eae detect 


seaeeitae ithe teats 








CMT 




















In Puvprr anp ParisH 


e Oc 


THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
NEW YORK - BOSTON - CHICAGO - DALLAS 
ATLANTA + SAN FRANCISCO 


MACMILLAN & CO., Lmitep 
LONDON + BOMBAY + CALCUTTA 
MELBOURNE 


THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Lr. 
TORONTO 


Aa OF LT 
a hokhs 17 1925 i 
\ 4 

. y 
CPs H GICAL LL SEWRE 


In Pucprr anp Parisy 


Yale Lectures on Preaching 


BY 


NATHANIEL J. BURTON, D. D., 


Once Pastor of Park Church, Hartford, Conn. 


EDITED BY 
RICHARD E. BURTON 


NEW YORK 


THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
1925 


Printed in the United States of America by 
WYNKOOP HALLENBECK CRAWFORD CO., NEW YORK 


“T am glad you are reprinting Nathaniel J. 
Burton’s Lectures on Preaching. I have always 
considered his lectures one of the very best courses 
in the entire Lyman Beecher’s series. I was for- 
tunate enough to come upon these Burton Lectures 
near the beginning of my ministry, and they left a 
mark on me which abides to thisday. One cannot 
read them and ever forget them. They were juicy 
when they were delivered, and at the end of forty 
years, they are juicy still.” 


[Stcnep] CHARLES E. JEFFERSON. 


Broadway Tabernacle, 
New York City, 
December. 1924. 
















5 jk ee A 
‘ oy , i as rg 
“4 4 6 : eat ‘ m.. 8 Gay q : 
: Es : : eras SOULE ang 
bale hI ER. 
$f APA BS een Al 
‘ ' . a) i % } 
x " 4 ‘ Dee os Tk 
is 
; oa »| 
Hh \ p 7 y 
j Beare 
ae ie Ny i > | Te y 
> i ) eS 
tt ¥ 
+¥: » 4 f 
hy r at 
j ’ : > 
4 ‘ - CF Pitas, 
) BaF aL re une 
. : ah AYE: Wot l 
Ne ' Pye Weer pyay a Rt ie aye ci . 
“i . 5 : oom ee) Pee tat iS 
‘ f ; Hath en valte: Taal pes NE aE 
iy \ 
Pa 
\ 
bias? eRe 
4 é ), 
: 
tj 


Y Maik ey 
AL a 


CONTENTS 


THE CALL TO THE MINISTRY 
MAKING SERMONS . 

f aptinto vie IN THE PREACHER ' 

~ IMAGINATION IN MINISTERS 

/ IMAGINATION IN SERMONS 
SHORT SERMONS 
EXTRA-PARISHIONAL FAITHFULNESS 
PARISH INCONVENIENCES 
CEREMONIAL OCCASIONS 
THe Ricut Conpuct oF PuBLIC WoRSHIP . a 
LIRERTY OF THOUGHT WITHIN CONGREGATIONALISM 
THE VAGUE ELEMENTS IN LANGUAGE 
THE SERVICE OF Arr IN RELIGION (I) 
THE SERVICE oF ART IN RELIGION (II) . 

vd Sanne IN SERMON Topics - 

a ASSIMILATION OF SERMON MATERIAL 
VERACITY IN MINISTERS 

vid ee viernes: IN THE MINISTRY 
LEGITIMATE ELEMENTS OF VARIETY IN CHURCH SERVICE 


ROUTINE: ITS PERILS AND 1TS VALUES . ; g . 


103 
121 
139 
157 
175 
192 
217 
236 
254 
276 
296 
321 
339 


357 


. a 3 ale ay 
sedan ; 
iene eh Van 
hs en ive ‘shane a 
crahreae er tae 


ote 
by ie 
hs 


i ‘ 


Mi 


Vil vais ey (Nog 


pas res Ue 
4e hig holewenet Fe Nt De 


fe i 
va, van iia ays ear. ate 





PEC Abie Oubr hy MUNS GR, 


My Brethren, as a matter of fact, men go into the Christian 
Ministry—go in genuinely I mean—by the pull of numerous forces ; 
sometimes in considerable blindness, sometimes in considerable illu- 
mination ; sometimes by their own private cogitations in the main, 
and sometimes with great quantities of advice (and sometimes 
against quantities of advice) ; sometimes by a rational, prolonged, 
and orderly process of investigation on the subject, and sometimes 
hap hazard ; sometimes against the stress of external circumstances 
and then again as drifted on by strong circumstances almost against 
their own will. When the anniversary of this theological institution 
comes around next May, and the ministers assemble in this chapel, 
for a free discussion of some topic, as their fashion has been, I 
should like to have them cease from topics for once, and each man 
just honestly tell how he happened to become a minister. Of 
‘course some would not want to tell, because it might lead some 
young man present (and I should want all you students there), to 
feel that he might go into the ministry just as they did—that is with 
as much uncertainty and solemn wondering whether he was not on 
the wrong track. Of course too, numbers of the ministers, in the 
present great joy of their vocation, and their present sense of what 
a holy thing it is to be.in it, would be in danger of overstating signs 
and tokens which are really necessary to a valid call ; and overstating, 
too, perhaps, the number of tokens that they themselves had when, 
in the days of their youth, they were considering the question, 
‘Shall I go in.” 

But, taking all those clerical witnesses together, I feel sure that, 
out of their miscellaneous biographies, you, my young brethren, 
would get an enlarged view of the variety of God’s operations in 
selecting and constraining his servants. That would overtake you 


2 YALE LECTURES. 


which overtook me as I went on in my, ministry. [ went out of this 
Seminary, as I had previously come out of the house of my father and 
mother, with a distinct view of the mode in which souls come 
into the kingdom of God; and of the spuriousness, of course, 
of all incomings which had not on them the regulation marks of 
that mode. But presently I began to discover scattered instances 
of what appeared to be other modes of conversion. Then I found 
more. And then more. For quite a while I dismissed them as un- 
doubted spurious cases. They must be. But when they grew 
thicker and thicker, and when on selecting some of the best cases of 
ripe piety that I knew, and inquiring of them how they came in, I 
learned one thing for certain—namely, that it was not by my way, 
I gradually emerged into the idea that God was not so narrow as I 
was, but worked in grace, as he does in visible Nature ; along cer- 
tain great established lines, to be sure, as for example that 
spring and summer shall come once in about so long, and with fixed 
general ‘features ; but within those lines, in a most vast and beau- 
tiful diversity, just as the spring and summer give us almost more 
sense of diversity than of uniformity. 

And as God calls men into his kingdom in more ways than one, 
so does He into his ministry ; as you would find, I say, if you could 
get a chapel full of honest men to tell their story. 

I knew a man, who took it for granted always from his youth, 
that he was to be a minister if he ever became a Christian. And 
why did he take it for granted? God only knows. He had never 
been so instructed by his father and mother. His father was him- 
self a minister, but he had not conversed with this son as to what he 
should be. For some reason, right or wrong, he had not. And so 
far as the son knew, these parents had not been moved to ask God 
that this particular one among their sons, should follow in the foot- 
steps of his father. And yet, that young man was as settled in the 
idea that, once a Christian, he should be a minister, as he was that 
once born, he should have to die some day. And he was so disin- 
clined to the profession that he refused to be a Christian, with such 
a corollary attached to it. He refused until near the end of his col- 
lege course. But then he yielded and moved easily and. without a 
struggle to his predestinated work, and in that work had many most 
clear and comfortable certifications that he was in the way of God’s 
choice for him. Now that man was under a cutious bondage, and 
the question is, was it a divine bondage. The conviction which held 


YALE LECTURES. 3 


him was not rational, in the sense that it rested on percéived reasons, 
but it may have been none the less a divine conviction. God is not 
tied up to processes of rationalization in getting men to do what he 
wants them to, ne means to have them. On the contrary, three- 
quarters of his Work in ordering human affairs is covert, we must 
suppose. If his power were put in only in those few instances 
where we see it, or are conscious of it, all things would go to wreck. 
No; he moves invisibly in the great kingdom of human wills, and 
bears the creation on to his own issues ; notwithstanding the va- 
poring of men, and their swollen self-consciousness, as though they 
were lording it here, Hee: hee own destinies, and. preparing 
the future of the race. , 

Now I do not present the example of that young man as an ideal 
towards which other youngymen are to strive. I will even admit, 
if you insist on it, that his oA. was pretty nearly the minimum of all 
calls—and dangerously small—but I name it as an encouragement 
to any here who have’ not been able as yet to make their call as 
large as > they. would like ; for this man of mine seems to have had 
proof enough i in his ibberient experience, that that first dim expe- 
rience, and blind energy of conviction which tied him to the Chris- 
tian Ministry, was indeed God, choosing a blind way, rather than 
an open one to accomplish his ends. 

It were possible to prepare a whole lecture on God’s blind ways 
with men—he preferring that way in numerous instances, in part, I 
suppose, because if he undertook to explain to his small and 
fumbling creatures, they would not half get hold of it; and in part, 
because the way of faith as distfnguished from the way of sight, is 
full of wholesome discipline for us ; and in part, too, because the 
magnificent surprises of God’s eventual disclosures as to the benig- 
nity of his obscure methods with us, will make us feel more than 
contented that we were detained here in a long twilight, and stretch of 
guess-work. We know that all our personal affairs are in his hands, 
and all eternity will be filled with tokens of his most blessed man- 
agement of them. 

But I am discoursing on the numerous ways in which God gets 
his ministers—and I wish to make them seem numerous in order 
that I may comfort all earnest hearts here present, in which God is 
really making out his call, whether distinctly or only darkly as yet ; 
and while I am willing to acknowledge the value of a resounding call, 
something full of symptoms supernatural and therefore full of im- 


4 YALE LECTURES. 


perative persuasion, I much desire to bring out the unquestionable 
facts of unresounding calls, thousands of them, calls that cannot be 
heard at all except as you listen closely; but which, reverently 
heeded, may grow at last to thunders of assurance. 

Dr. Horace Bushnell, in tracing his own pedigree, and minis- 
terial outstart, could not, with all his fine imagination, make out for 
himself a regulation call. To be sure he had a mother, who carried 
him in her heart, body, soul, and spirit, mother-fashion, but silently 
in the main. He was in the way of knowing that she had great de- 
sires for him of all sorts—or rather he was in the way of feeling that, 
because she scarcely spoke of it, as I said :—these deep mothers 
with their unfathomable, speechless broodings, are not without a 
witness, especially where their boys are particularly clairvoyant ; and 
their undeclared will and longing works like a fiat often, and makes 
destiny for their beloved three times more than much hustling would, 
and an officious clatter of teaching and entreaty. At any rate, Bush- 
nell always felt a certain stress upon him, mother-born somehow, 
and he became a Christian, and then a collegian, and then a gradu- 
ate, and then after a little, he clearly settled his mind to be a law- 
yer, and not a minister. And he wrote a decisive letter to that 
effect. At that juncture, that long-silent mother broke silence. The 
fact was, in all the mothering of that boy antecedent to his birth, 
she had mortgaged him to a particular service and that service was 
not the law, and she, being about to have all her sacred thoughts and 
clear assurances thwarted, apparently, by the eccentric snap-judg- 
ment of her mysterious Horace, took a sudden hand in the fulfill- 
ment of her own prayers, and spoke out—all dumbness is not of 
inability, but, as often as any way, of wisdom, and of God’s seal set 
on the lips—she spoke, and said: ‘ You have settled this question 
inconsiderately, so far as I can see. I ask you now to wait till you 
can consult your own mind. I think you had best accept the tutor- 
ship in Yale College that has been offered you.” There she 
stopped in mid-volley. A lesser woman would have marched on into 
an argument for the ministry—the opening for it seemed good— 
but a person who could hold her peace twenty-six or seven years, 
could wait on God a little longer; peradventure, the law being 
staved off for a year sure, various gracious pressures would have their 
chance to get in on her son (which they did) ; and so, on that 
whiff of chance wind, one of our greatest men was lodged where he 
belonged ; and was able to write nearly half a century afterwards: 


YALE LECTURES. 5 


“As I look back on the crisis then passed, it seems very much 
like the question whether I should finally be. No other calling but 
this ministry of Christ, I am obliged to feel, could have any wise 
filled my inspirations, and allowed me sufficiently to be.” 

_ §o, this man was not misplaced among human callings, by the 
wilfulness of his mother, moaning and wandering in false inspirations, 
but he was set to his life task—well, by many things ; some of them 
plain enough, some dim, some very dim, and some absolutely un- 
discoverable at present, no doubt; but whether it was the constitu- 
tion of his mind shaped in all sorts of gestations ante-natal and other, 
or the many inworkings of the Holy Ghost, or the force of external 
circumstances, all the causes head up in the far-away choice, selec- 
tion, and will of God—this primal all-knowing will started for its 
chosen and choice man by innumerable paths, by ten thousand inter- 
mediates, by straight marches now, and now by the most laborious 
and mysterious indirection, by delays, by reverses, by apparent total 
defeats ; but like the tortuous river, it failed not to find its way, and 
reached its end, and I insist that God not merely permits his minis- 
ters to find their calling in these groping and accidental ways, but 
delights in it—not as unable to delight in other ways more illumined 
all along and more full of comfort, therefore, to the anxious man, 
but as pleased to make his providence on earth a versatile thing. 
And while I am on this subject of small calls, I might as well 
mention to you that Dr. Bushnell, telling the story of his mother’s 
mother, related that, up in the wilds of Vermont, whither she had 
emigrated from these parts, she started a religious public service, 
laying it on her timid husband to offer the prayers, and putting in, 
to read printed sermons from Sunday to Sunday, an Unchristian 
young man, whom she had quietly sized and sampled. She seems 
to have been a woman who had some look of faith in her eyes, so 
that men succumbed to her bidding ; and when after a time, she had 
concluded that her young man had the natural making of a minister 
in him, she proceeded to furnish the supernatural, by a notice 
served on him one day as he came from the pulpit, that he must be 
a Methodist minister. ‘But I am not a Christian,” said he. ‘‘ No 
matter, you are called to be a Christian, and a preacher both, in one 
call, as Saul was.” Of course, this peremptory woman did not 
deliver this summons till she was sent to do it. This youth had 
been much in her prayers, and she thought she knew what she was 
about. Therefore, the blessed spirit, when he had caused young 


6 YALE LECTURES. 


Hedding to be assaulted in front in this way, did not fail to assault 
him in his soul also, and he was not disobedient to his call, but fell 
in straightway, and when I, a little boy, saw him as Bishop Hedding, 
of the Methodist Episcopal Church, I thought he was the greatest 
man I had ever seen, up to that date ; and he certainly was one of 
the most respectable and serviceable men in the communion where 
he spent his life. I do not deny that Bishop Hedding’s call grew to 
be large enough, by and by, but when it was first delivered to him it 
seemed to him little—too little to go on—only the sudden dictum of 
one woman, and she not infallible, one would say. But, fallible or 
infallible, God used her. And he used that sermon-reading to get 
Hedding ready for the crisis that was to come. And, if we could 
get back into all God’s secrecies, we should find that the fuse for 
that explosion had been laid long ago, and had not been permitted 
to be blown out by the thousand winds of heaven. 

I give you these personal instances, my brethren, which might 
be multiplied to any extent, because I would like to have it appear, 
beyond a peradventure, that God uses his liberty, in moving men 
along into his service ; uses it clear to the borders of eccentricity, 
as men would say. If he wishes to secure an ambassador and 
newsbearer of his grace, by a hand laid on him heavy as doom, he 
does it—and oftentimes precisely that is his wish—but if he wishes 
to secure you or me by a touch scarcely discernible, as some almost 
unstatable impression in our feeling, an impression which we cannot 
make seem tangible and solid to anybody outside of ourselves, or 
some slight concurrence of circumstances which seems to have 
omens in it, then He takes that way ;—and if a man’s ministerial 
call takes the whispered and scarcely articulate form, let him not 
despise it, and if it comes to him like seven trumpets, let him not be 
made proud, and be brought to the conclusion that God’s whispers 
have no authority in them. 

But now, having said so much by way of leading you along 
into an elastic conception of God’s ways in this great business of 
multiplying ministers, Iam willing to spread out before you the ele- 
ments and items of what is customarily considered a full-toned and 
ideal call. I can see no hurt in mentioning them, especially as I shall 
try to forestall all hurt from them by an occasional remark by the 
way. . 

First, then. If a man has gifts, he may be a minister—and 
examining committees always feel bound to start the question of gifts. 


YALE LECTURES. 7 


Has the candidate any intellect, and has the moral region of his 
head any size? Can he think? And when he thinks does he pro- 
duce anything, ordinarily? Is there any ethical sound to the move- 
ment of his mind? Does he know anything? Can he tell to other 
people what he knows? Can he tell it in an engaging manner, so 
that if we start him out as a preacher, somebody will be likely to 
want to hear him. 

_ And then passing from his mind to his exterior make-up, what 
physical gifts has he? Is he a person whom one can look at with 
any comfort? What sort of a voice has he? Has he lungs, and a 
degree of digestion, and an affirmative physique all around, rather 
than a physique negative and peeping. 

These, and the like, are the endowments that we like to see in 
a young man who begins to surmise that the Christian ministry is 
his proper pursuit. 

At the same time, in order that we may not be too knowing in 
this matter, and may not fall into the delusion that God is shut up 
to ten-talented people, for the accomplishment of his works, behold 
_ what mighty men some weak men are, in his kingdom and work-field. 

I was considerably instructed by what I once heard from the 
lips of the Rev. William Taylor, the Methodist evangelist who has 
preached his way clear around the world, once at least, and has not 
found even unknown languages any bar to great spiritual success. 
He paused, in his journey, at South Africa, and soon found himself 
at the head of a powerful movement of God among the natives of 
that region. And one night down in the bush, there was heard a 
phenomenal outcrying, the like of which no man ever heard before. 
It created some alarm, as though some wild animal might be in the 
woods there; but a company of the bravest men started for a 
search ; and the animal proved to be a deaf and dumb Zulu, on his 
knees, in great agony of guilt before God. They reverently withdrew, 
and left him to his lonely wrestling ; and after two or three days, 
and a few more religious meetings, the man came out in great joy, 
a Christian convert. And they took him into the church, a clear 
trophy, and baptised him William Taylor, And, after things had 
gone on a little, William applied for a license to preach. He had 
no conceit about it, as though he was a suitable minister for the 
settlements, but he thought he could push out into the back country 
among the dark-minded inhabitants, and do some good. After one 
of the public services, the missionaries were discussing his strange 


8 YALE LECTURES. 


case in the chancel, William standing by and earnestly watching their 
faces to see what the upshot might be, when one of the ministers, 
touched by the sight of him, handed him a testament as a present: 
whereupon William was delighted as being now licensed, as he sup- 
posed, and he pushed straight off for his preaching; and Mr. 
Taylor testified that God used the man, most evidently. Of course 
his oratory was meager. Many of you, young gentlemen, have felt 
that yours is, but you are all very eloquent compared to him. He 
could do nothing but pantomime. But what there was of his 
oratory was so sincere and earnest that men heeded him, and 
caught the sense of the few fundamental things that he tried to 
teach ; and some were conscience-smitten, and sent to God for his 
mercy, by this poor incapable soul, imprisoned in eternal silence. 
To be sure, some of the back-country people came down to the 
station at last for a change of ministers ; just as in the case of most 
of us, a change of parishes is found to be best after a certain time ; 
but so long as he lasted, William was as much sent as St. Paul was. 

This is the strongest case of weak things made mighty in the 
ministry of reconciliation, that I ever heard of; but I have heard of 
a good many like it—and, in running over the list of my acquaint- 
ances who have unquestionably succeeded in our calling, I have 
found so many who had no natural right to succeed as being par- 
ticularly able men, that the question of gifts has long ago ceased to 
be the major question with me. It is one question, but not the 
decisive one. Settle it either way, in any given case, and the exam- 
ination had better proceed all the same. If the candidate is a 
genius, very well, and if he is not a genius, very well; let us look 
him over still further. 

The second sign of a real ministerial call is found in a certain 
convergence of the man’s circumstances towards the work ministerial. 
Perhaps he has absolutely no money wherewith to get a suitable educa- 
tion for the work. Perhaps he is tied to some present duty, which 
hinders; as the care of his aged parents, for example, or the 
carrying of a business from which he cannot withdraw equitably. 
But these obstructions, and a hundred more, are not entirely deci- 
sive, as many a strongly-resolved and powerfully-pushing man has 
found. The ways of money-getting, if you are thoroughly con- 
cluded in your own mind to get it, in order to the service of God, 
are almost perilously numerous in these days. The young student 
burning to be a minister is the delight of the Christian world. 


YALE LECTURES. 9 


Societies are organized for him. Dying men remember to estab- 
lish permanent funds for his benefit. Sewing circles consider 
his case. Uneducated relatives take pride in it, that a person of 
their own blood starts out to represent the family in the educated 
walks of life. Adult ministers all about, recollecting their own early 
struggles, are filled with pathos towards him. And in addition to 
these ordinary, natural, calculable furtherances, if he be a true 
man, he will have windfalls dropping in on him now and then in 
such a curious way as to seem preternatural. They come from un- 
known sources perhaps. Or they come from eminently unlikely, 
and humanly impossible sources ; from the pocket of a life-long cur- 
mudgeon it may be, a man never known to relent before, a man 
whose relenting in the one case was the wonder of the town. I 
knew an instance where a divinity student was overtaken by just that 
phenomenon. Yes, all things are possible to God, and from the day 
that the smitten rock opened out its floods for the watering of all 
Israel, the men of God are entitled to look for dashes of the uncom- 
mon in their own lives, together with many good strokes of the 
common and the natural, so that our second sign of a real ministe- 
rial call, namely, the co-operation of circumstances, is a good 
enough sign if you have it, but not a cause of despair, if you do not. 
What hosts of us can rise up and testify to that. The modern ma- 
terialistic philosophy is pounding away on the imperative domina- 
tion of circumstances, and we are all set, soul and body, in the rut of 
a mechanical fatalism, but every living man of us knows, that while 
the press of circumstances is very cogent sometimes, yet the chief- 
est circumstance in the creation of God after all, is the free-born, 
and puissant soul of man, and that the ordering of one’s own circum- 
stances, especially as the individual man is yoked in with the will of 
God, is the one splendor and the one zest of life; the heroism of 
all heroism, and the magnetism of all living history. 

The third indication of a young man truly called, is the 
united advice of judicious friends. That is very valuable. Often a 
man is better known by-others than he is by himself. He under- 
rates himself—or perchance, he overrates himself—and which is 
worst for a minister I hardly know. Sometimes I think that, in- 
asmuch as exact self-measurement is just about impossible, the 
exaggeration of conceit is more profitable than the exaggeration of 
humility. But, take advice, brethren—take advice. Bystanders are 
more unprejudiced than you are. People of large experience in the 


10 YALE LECTURES. 


affairs of life—old ministers, and so on—know what sort of men are 
fitted for affairs, and whether you are, even approximately, that kind 
of man. 

Find out, too, what the church in which you were reared 
thinks of your adaptations—and what the congregations all about 
think, to whom you have incidentally exposed your abilities, on whom 
you have laid out your earnestness from time to time, and, possibly, 
practiced your oratorical arts. When I came to the serious work of 
shaping myself for life, I found that the rustic assemblies in several 
_ country school-houses, before whom I had discussed questions 
during the long winter evenings, for the relief of my own mind, had 
rade up a silent verdict on my case, which they were now willing to 
put in as a makeweight in my favor, on the whole—and I leaned 
back on them, or rather on certain persons in those assemblies, with 
a satisfaction, made up partly of pride, partly of gratitude, and 
partly of an unanalyzable pathos towards the rank and file of human 
nature. 

But, friends, we must not lean too much on even so good a 
thing as advice. I like the saying of one of our ministers: Advice 
is to help a man do as he pleases. That is putting the matter un- 
qualifiedly, but all the sententious and golden sentences of the 
world, are made sententious by their heroic suppression of qualifiers. 

Who advised our Lord to go on? What Christian in those 
parts took any stock in Saul of Tarsus as a preacher, when he first 
setup tobe one? Who was ready to license that deafand dumb Zulu? 
Who could persuade the church-bishop of York to accept as candi- 
date for deacon’s order that non-collegiate old slave-trader and 
man of sin, John Newton? And when scores of us now living were 
approbated as gospel ministers, what a considerable negative vote, 
spoken or unspoken, was folled up against us. 

On the other hand, what scores of men have been wafted into 
the ministry on unanimous gales of judicious advice, and have 
practically shown the miserable fallibility of that advice. I myself 
once had under my hand a theological student in the first stages of 
his education, over whose head all the stars of destiny seemed to 
conjoin ; and we supported him, prayed for him, and boarded him 
around in our houses, free board ; but the root of grace in his heart 
proved feeble, there was a constitutional strain of unmanliness in 
him, and he grew slovenly in his ethical distinctions ; and to tell the 
truth mildly, we could not any longer put up with him. “I have 


YALE LECTURES. 11 


entertained a Devil unawares,” said one of our Christians, where 
our young man had had some months of good board for nothing— 
and we all took back our judicious advice that he go into the Chris- 
tian ministry. 

The advice of mortal men is valuable, but not infallible. 

Up to this point, now, I have delayed in the region of what 
may be called the natural signs of a minister, but now, at last, I 
propose to have a word with you on the signs supernatural. 

There are men in the world, who hold that all the call into the 
ministry a person needs, or had better exert himself to get, is a good 
concurrence of those naturals on which I have discoursed. Let him 
put his unexcited common-sense out among them, and see how they 
stand, just as he would coolly settle any secular question on the hard 
facts presented. Let him enter our holy calling in that reasonable 
and not particularly inspired way, and do his work there conscien- 
tiously ; and all the supernatural things that are desirable, lights, 
warmths, empowerments, gifts of the Holy Ghost, will come in and 
do their part to make him a success in the world. 

Theoretically, the Protestant Episcopal Church, the Dutch Re- 
formed Church, the Presbyterian Church, the Methodist, the 
Baptist, and I do not know but every church on earth, Greek, 
Latin and Protestant, holds to the coefficient presence of the 
natural and the supernatural in every veritable ministerial 
call. And their offices for the ordination of ministers are all 
shaped to that idea; but in the Greek or Latin branch of 
the Catholic Church, and even in the Protestant Episcopal branch 
of it, if all the requisites of good order, and church order, were 
met and satisfied in the case of a young man, they would receive 
him into their ministry with less supernatural marks upon him and in 
him, than the Methodists, for example, would demand. And ifa 
young man seemed to have any amount of those marks on him, and 
in him, but at the same time, had somewhat disorderly and un- 
churchly about him, or had in him any strong exuberances of mys- 
ticism, those grave and cautious churches first mentioned would 
want to look him over three times, before they admitted him to 
holy orders—whatever of the Holy Ghost there might be in him, 
they would disrespect to that extent; but the Methodists on the 
other hand, and numbers of other denominations, would admit him 
more easily—not doubting that so sane an influence as the spirit of 
God in that young man would ultimately reduce his unbalance and 

4 


12 '- YALE LECTURES. 


his irregularities. Meanwhile, life, even in an occasional rampancy, 
is better than the first-class property of death, and no inspiration at 
all, they would add. 

So easy is it, under much unity of abstract doctrine on this 
subject, and much sameness of ordination forms, to have a certain 
amount of practical diversity. 

My brethren, having now stated the different particulars of a 
valid call, as partly natural and partly supernatural, and having spent 
some time on the naturals, I desire to put in an energetic testimony 
in behalf of God’s direct and explicit part in the calling of his ser- 
vants and ambassadors. Of course our natural gifts are his gift— 
and our circumstances are of his providing and our good advices 
are his messages—and therefore there is a sense in which these 
natural things are all supernatural, and that sense of things we need to 
bear in mind, with reverence and gratitude ; but over and beyond 
all that, God may serve a noticeon a man in wonderful ways—in 
ways that force the man to say, “Lo! God is here with me—in me 
—all through me—through and through—calling me—pressing me 
—making me seven times willing, expectant, and self-consecrate.” 
The leading instances of that: sort of call in Holy Writ, are pretty 
familiar to you. Abraham had one, when he left Mesopotamia to 
become the father of us all ; and having had one, he went on to have 
many—notably his summons to sacrifice Isaac. And inasmuch as 
this stateliest of primitive men, and original corner-stone of a uni- 
versal divine kingdom, was a man of repeated calls from the skies, 
we naturally look to see his successors distinguished in the same 
way, and so they were. Isaac was. Jacobwas. Joseph was. Moses 
was most remarkably. He undertook to beg off from one of his 
vocations, on the ground that he was no orator, just as many of us 
plausibly might, and as that South African dumb man certainly 
might. ‘I cannot go to King Pharaoh, I am slow of speech and 
of a slow tongue,” said he, (Ex. 4, 10) ; whereupon his vocation 
was reiterated upon him in a very moving and compulsory manner. 

All the Prophets, too, had calls—calls marked by a strong array 
of externals and naturals in some cases, but marked by supernatural 
tokens and special inner movements in all cases. I wish there were 
time to recite the picturesque accounts which numbers of them 
have given of their own calls. Isaiah was in the temple when his 
came—and he saw God there in visible, high enthronement, and 
he heard God speak in the speech of men actual and understanda- 


YALE LECTURES. 13 


ble ; and there were visible seraphim and seraphic voices, and the 
poor awe-struck man’s lips were touched with a living coal by one 
of those strange, superhuman personages ; and taking the whole 
scene together, there was enough of the transcendental and amazing 
in it to more than furnish forty modern men with a call of the 
rather rationalistic and purely common-sense kind which some con- 
sider sufficient. (Isah. 6.) 

- Jeremiah too, had a similar elaborate call, wherein he was in- 
formed that from a point anterior to his very birth the predetermi- 
nations of God had lighted on him for the prophetic office. (Jer. 
ry '52) 

Which reminds me I ought to have said that Samuel, the first in 
God’s line of official seers, was a very emphatically called man—or 
boy rather, for God drew nigh to him when he was only a boy—and 
looking back along the history of that boy we discover that Gud, 
working through the prevision and the holy yearning of Hannah, 
his mother, had him consecrated to His service ere he saw the light. 
(1 Sam. 3, 14.) 

And we are told that even the mechanics, and skillful workmen, 
who were to put up and adorn God’s holy temple, had certain mysti- 
cal empowerments vouchsafed to them. 

Of course the stiff church idea of ministerial calls gets some 
comfort for itself out of the fact that the Jewish priests were born to 
their function, the office being hereditary ; but in the original conse- 
cretion of the Aaronic priesthood, once for all, God came forth in 
explicit marvels to give, on the spot, a supernatural authentication 
to the proceeding, and make out a call that had in it every conceiv- 
able aspect of a call; “which, when all the people saw,” (says the 
history,) “ they shouted and fell on their faces ;” (Lev. 9, 24) ; they 
were awe-struck by the miracle there wrought in sanctification of 
Aaron and his posterity. Moreover, all along the line of those 
priestly generations, God threw in his special attestations now and 
then, and even in the routine of their priestly service, worked in asa 
part of the structure thereof, there were incessant corruscations of 
the supernatural. 

But I must make haste into the New Testament period, and as 
we enter it, are we not pressed upon by an irresistible preposses- 
sion that the glory of the old system, in the matter of which we 
have been speaking, will be at least kept up in the new, inasmuch 
as the new is but the old brought on to its fullness and final re- 


14 ‘YALE LECTURES. 


splendence. So we should naturally judge, and so it is.) The New 
Testament conception of a call, is particularly strong on its super- 
natural side. We have moved down now into the era of the Holy 
Ghost, and, because we have, we notice a slackening of marvels ex- 
ternal. There are enough of them—Saul had them in his call— 
Jesus had them in his—all the Apostles had them sooner or later in 
confirmation of their ministry—still, things went to the interior 
more, and the idea of the inner light came to be more emphasized. 

However, all I care now to insist upon, as in the line of my 
subject, is that God’s ministers in those days did not get into their 
ministry by a deliberate and business-like consideration of pru- 
dentials on their part, and then a decision to go in, making out 
their own call as it were ; but they had laid upon them a supernat- 
ural compulsion, or a rather irresistible stress—a voice out of the 
sky in Paul’s case—a personal call from Jesus in the case of the 
Apostolic twelve—a solemn casting of lots in the case of Matthias 
to take the place of Judas the Apostate, (which lot-casting was an 
old time divinely accredited method of discovering God’s will, and 
not a piece of mere hap-hazard, by any means) : these were the ways 
of God in those times, when he would fill up the number of his ser- 
vants—and on these New Testament and Old Testament data, the 
church at large has always stood and preached the doctrine of min- 
isters supernaturally called. Called of God as was Aaron, and not 
self-sent, must they all be. ‘The doctrine has been carried over clear 
into moonshine in individual cases ; and possibly whole denomina- 
tions of Christians have landed in vagaries of mysticism on the 
point, for the time—and these personal and denominational vagaries 
have been such a standing warning to all beholders, that many, being 
much determined to be thoroughly sensible, and a little more, have 
studiously eliminated from God’s calls every least suffusion of the 
direct supernatural. It is the indefeasible privilege of finite and 
foolish man to swing from one exaggeration to another; but in the 
midst of all extremes on this subject, the thunderous great voice of 
the general church has persistently affirmed the right of God’s min- 
isters to be called—by-earth-born voices no doubt, such as circum- 
stances, mental gifts, personal piety, committees, councils, the arch- 
bishop of York, and all the rest—but by heavenly voices as well, 
and principally. 

My brethren, I started this lecture on a low key, perhaps you 
thought, but I have got it up now, you see. And yet not so far up, 


YALE LECTURES. 15 


I hope, as to disavow my first thought, that men may become minis- 
ters on a small and feeble call. I gave some instances of the small 
call, you may remember, and I showed some sympathy with those 
instances—but I have great sympathy with instances more sky-born. 
Feeble calls are not things to be aimed at, and striven for, but 
things to be put up with rather, when our higher aims and strivings 
do not seem to bring us into the whole fullness of God. God’s full- 
ness is what we want. Calls may begin feeble (they often do,) but 
as the years go on, and our work goes on, the call ought to go on, 
too, from strength to strength, being more and more articulate, 
affirmative and inspiring. Men who are young, and of only a few 
years of religious experience, and a few years of religious study, 
may innocently have less vision, less sense of God, less ability to 
tell a divine thing when they see it, or separate a still, small voice of 
celestial authority from the ten thousand terrestial noises with which 
it is mixed up—may innocently have less of everything, than those 
who are far on in the ministry; but a minister whose call begins 
feeble and stays feeble, never had a call in all likelihood. There 
come lulls in everybody’s call. We are fearfully and wonderfully 
made. And we behave fearfully and wonderfully sometimes. And 
whether it be ourselves or our circumstances, or the machinations of 
creatures invisible, the truth is we have sinkings, and collapses, and 
comatose moods, and general retirements of our faculties, spiritual 
and all—nevertheless, every minister ought to have a growing sense 
of mission,,on the whole ; he must not be all lulls. If he loses his 
call some day, he must get it again, and if he be a true minister, he will. 
There is a band of music moving about the streets of the 
city, and it is curious to notice in what alternating swells and falls it 
comes to you. Now you hear it, and now you hear it not. A waft 
of wind has caught it. A line of buildings intervenes. Or, possi- 
bly, the musicians themselves have ceased from their strong blasts, 
and are moving through their gentler and half-inaudible passages. 
So is it with this other, and more heavenly music; the music of 
God’s voice inviting us to be co-workers with him in the Gospel of 
his Son. That great, authentic voice comes to us through this and - 
that medium, even as the air at large is made to deliver itself melo- 
diously through the several instruments of the band ; but for various 
reasons, some innocent and some not, that one dearest music of our 
life, as chosen men of God, finds its ways to our ear inconstantly. 
Various unpardonable winds sweep in. Various infirmities, whereinto 


16 YALE LECTURES. 


we were born, and from which we cannot wholly escape, interpose 
their confusion. Possibly an occasionable miserable gust from the 
outlying hells of the universe points this way, to hinder our hearing. 
And, possibly, God himself, at intervals, for wise reasons, slackens the 
clear vigor of his call and we are left to listen for his gentler tones. 
All this is incidental to a life on earth. But no real minister will 
consent, or will be called upon to consent, to a life-long loss of his 
supernatural commission. By and by, the old music will come back. 
In some watch in the night, in some moment of prayer and 
mourning, in some studious hour, in some praying assembly of 
God’s people, by some bed where a saint lies dying, in the uplifted 
delivery of some sermon ; somewhere and before long, he will catch 
again that voice of voices, that call of his Heavenly Father, and 
straightway his work will be transfigured before him again, and he 
will bear into it as with the strength of ten. 
Blessed be God that he does not forsake his servants. 


MAKING SERMONS. 


If almost any preacher should offer to tell me just how he 
managed in making his sermons, I should certainly say: “Go on 
brother, IJ am eager to hear you.’”’ I have heard quite a good many 
tell, some common and some uncommon ones; and I have settled 
my own habits so that no amount of testimony would be likely now 
to make any serious improvement in me ; nevertheless, just as much 
I should want to have that man give me his story. ‘“‘ Nothing apper- 
taining to humanity is foreign to me,” said a Latin writer long ago ; 
and in like manner, I do not know that there is anything on earth 
so interesting as a preacher and his habits, to preachers. 

So then I have concluded to raise courage to give you who are 
here present my notions and my methods in sermon making. My 
methods are the result of my notions, and my notions are the result 
of my methods. There is a reciprocal motherhood there, which 
does not seem quite natural at first, but is natural enough when you 
look into it. 

We start out into our methods in all fields of effort, under the 
push of some preconceptions, there being no reason why we should 
take one course rather than another, in sermon-making, or in any- 
thing else, except those foregoing, and more or less established ideas ; 
and then, if it so happens that those ideas, subjected to experiment, 
are practically validated, behold they (the ideas,) get great refresh- 
ment out of those validations, and are set up in their own conceit 
as though they were made for the first time, self born; as’ is 
copiously illustrated in the realm of science, where some tentative 
thought, some bright hypothesis, starts a line of explorations, and 
those explorations, in their turn, confirm the hypothesis. A mutual 
motherhood you see. 

Ah, well, mutuality is the greatest law we know of! 


18 ' YALE LECTURES. 


I. The first thing to be considered in a sermon is the getting 
of a topic ; and on that I would exhort you to a large range of free- 
dom. Keep within the lines of Christianity ; you had better, no 
doubt, because you are Christian preachers ; but be careful to see 
those lines as sweeping a very large circuit, and be careful to hold 
yourself privileged to plunder all creation beyond those lines for 
material wherewith to enrich your truly Christian discourse. There 
is a powerful and most miscellaneous immigration to these North 
American shores, but there are forces here to Americanize these 
multitudes ; it is all right, let them come. And if preachers are 
energetically Christian, the immigration into their discourses of the 
total population of the world will do no hurt, but, on the contrary, 
will load them up with valuable stock. 

I find that topics come to me from all points of the compass. 
Time was when I preferred they should come to me from the Bible, 
and I had a kind of guilty feeling if they did not, but I could not con- 
trol the matter. Everything started my mind off in discoursings ; 
my newspaper, my secular books, my contact with all sorts of men, 
the accidental things of my life, and the accidental things of other 
peoples’ lives, the talks of my.brethren in the prayer meetings,. 
politics, my walks abroad on the face of nature, my summer 
outings—a thousand things—the mind has front doors on all sides 
—and pretty soon I began to keep a book of subjects, wherein I 
put down everything that seemed to have large and discoursible 
contents in it, whether Christian or heathen, I did it instinctively, 
and I see now that I was right. Do not be afraid of a cosmopolitan 
accumulation of material, but look out that you diligently grind it all 
down in the hopper of a regenerate and Christianly determined mind. 

II. Well, you have selected your topic I will suppose, and 
what you now want is a host of thoughts on that topic—the more 
the better. } 

On reaching that crisis I do this ordinarily ; I go to my desk 
and my pen and my paper, and there sit waiting for thoughts. I 
open all my windows hospitably, so that if they want to come in 
they can. And they almost always want to. Somehow they hear 
that Iam there. Why do all the winds of heaven pour down towards 
a vacuum? Why do all the birds of heaven pour down through 
zones and zones seeking the summer? Why do all the waters of 
the world drift down towards any hollow anywhere? And why does 
all heaven move towards beseeching souls? No matter why. So it 


YALE LECTURES. 19 


is, and that is enough. And it is enough for me to know that some- 
how my waiting mind there in my study is universally advertised, 
and excites a universal good will towards me, so that my windows 
are filled with inflocking thoughts, according (I am compelled to 
say,) to the size, and what not, of my mind. Exactly here, comes 
in the differences between men. I can conceive of even a minis- 
ter’s sitting there, with all his windows lifted, and no inflockings. 
Some physical stupidity has hold of him. Some exhaustion has 
come, some anxiety, some clatter in the street, possibly some mis- 
chievous unembodied spirit from out the Somewhere that skirts this 
life of ours. But a man cannot have been a minister a great while 
without getting on to a point where, ordinarily, the currents of crea- 
tion will begin to flow his way when he takes his place there at his 
desk. His mind may be a plain one and not over-sizable, but if 
there was enough of it to start in the ministry and get on a short 
time—treally get on—it will have thoughts, more or less, when it 
takes its position and waits for them. Sometimes they will come in 
multitudes. Another day they will simply straggle in. And anoth- 
er day, as I said, for special reasons, they may not come at all. 

But, come they profusely, or come they very scattering, all that 
do come I record on the spot. I record the large and magnetic 
thoughts, of course (if any such happen along,) but I record the 
little ones too. I record everything that. can be spoken of as 
amounting to a thought on that chosen subject of mine. And I 
keep on in that way so long as thoughts come at all. No doubt by 
that time I have what some would call a very heterogeneous and 
unusable mass of material—a perfect chaos precipitated there on my 
paper. But they are mistaken. They know not the beautiful sanity 
of the human mind and the beautiful coherencies on which it insists, 
always and instinctively. All those items there recorded are strung 
on one string, and are no hotch-potch at all, because the mind that 
waited for them at the desk and got them, waited in a certain status 
—it was not a vacuum by a good deal, but a mind occupied by a 
chosen subject, as the love of God, or the ruin of man, or the pas- 
sion of Jesus on Calvary ; and whatever thoughts come to a mind 
thus preoccupied, and in that particular status, come they from 
here or there or yonder, or from regions most remote, will assured- 
ly be in every case, and without one exception to all eternity, 
congruous to that mind in that particular state. A rather striking 
fact when you look at it. I heard a lecture many years ago on The 


20 YALE LECTURES. 


Laws of Disorder, and this fact which I have just given you, the 
profound fact that all minds have thoughts harmonious with their 
nature, and on any given occasion harmonious to their special state 
for the time being, so that the thoughts are not a medley, but an 
affiliated multitude—that fact I say, may well come in as one illus- 
trative item under that brilliant caption—The Laws of Disorder. I 
energize on this point a little because I have heard of men objecting 
that this way of securing the stuff of sermons secures a mass of 
unrelated items, and makes a sermon just an omnibus of unclassifi- 
able particulars. I say itis not so. And I give a good reason for 
saying it, to wit: that, in the nature of things, only those ideas drift 
into a waiting mind preoccupied by a subject, which are germane to 
that mind in its special mood or state as thus preoccupied ; and if 
all the ideas floating in are thus germane to one mind, they must 
be germane to each other; and there is no getting around it. 

When I speak of a waiting mind I do not mean a non-affirma- 
tive, non-energized, Mr. Micawber sort of a mind, waiting for 
something to turn up, but a mind intent, a mind that goes to its 
windows and looks out and longs, and thrusts forth its telescope to 
find something. A mind thus intense, investigatory, and practically 
beseeching, amounts to a tremendous loadstone in the midst of the 
tull-stocked creation—full-stocked with the materials of thought— 
and when this or that comes into the windows of such a mind it is 
stamped by that mind, and specialized to its uses, with a threefold 
vigor, and all the incomes thus explicitly stamped are the more 
explicitly germane to each other, and visibly of one species. 

I insist on this original exertion, this doing of one’s best with- 
out the help of books or-anything else ; I insist on that, as the first 
step towards a sermon, because only by that kind of exercise does 
a man grow to be a real and fertile thinker, whom endless produc- 
tion does in no wise exhaust, but does continually replenish rather ; 
the mind of man being not a pond that can be drained off by a few 
years of sermonizing, but an artesian well, a constitutionally up-bub- 
bling thing, so long as life and health hold out. I congratulate you, 
young gentlemen, that you all have that practically infinite thing in 
you ; and that as you go on in your ministry you may be more and 
more conscious of this inexhaustible exuberance, and may move in 
the joy and courage of that consciousness. 

I insist upon original effort ; that, rather than reading to begin 
with, for another reason. In every mental act there are two factors 


YALE LECTURES. 21 


involved ; the thinking mind, and the external materials which it 
manipulates ; and men may be classified as original and productive 
thinkers, or as copyists, plagiarists, and forms of echo, according as 
they dominate this their material, or are dominated by it. But the 
most ignominious person in all the world, if so that he have one re- 
maining spark, or last flicker, of manliness in him, desires to be a man 
of supreme generative force and not an echo ever ; and this he can 
secure only as in the handling of subjects he thinks with all his 
might before he reads, as I have already described. Let him go 
from that desk of solitary effort on his theme to any amount of 
reading on it, and those readings instead of overloading him and 
smothering him, and making his whole movement stupid and un- 
wieldly, and giving every listener to his sermon to know that it 
is in reality a borrowed one, will be athletically, victoriously appro- 
priated, assimilated and turned to use, being coined and made his 
own visibly in the mint of his own vigor. Moreover, coming to the 
books bearing on his topic—the commentaries and all the rest—his 
mind within him will be so vital and informed by his preliminary 
meditations and creative acts, that it will gather up the parts and 
elements of those books that are suitable to his purpose, and usable, 
with a double rapidity. I have been surprised many times, after I 
have diligently gestated a subject myself and then have started out 
into my library for the say-so of other men on that subject, to 
notice not merely in what a lightsome and expert way I handled 
them, but‘also in what a swift facility I utilized their many volumes ; 
—sometimes one glance will answer—and if I encounter a book 
wherein the entire subject is opened out profoundly and in a com- 
plete treatment, considerable portions of the book I catch up with 
a touch and go, and the denser parts cannot very long delay me. 
This sounds boastful, but it is not. Almost any man may make the 
experiment for himself. And I advise you all to make it—and to 
keep making it so long as you live. 

Some of you perhaps would like to say to me, “ now that very 
rule—first think and then read—does not apply equally well to all 
kinds of sermons ;”’ so let us look at that. 

If the sermon is purely expository, our one duty is to tell 
exactly what the sacred writer meant to say in the passage before us 
—where then does that original and generative effort of which I 
have spoken set in, and can it come in at all? I answer, it is a 
notorious fact that one man will find three times as much in a 


22 YALE LECTURES. 


passage as another—find it, I say, not put it in, as the manner of 
some inventive gentlemen is, whose spirit is imaginative more than 
historical and to whom the Bible is a partially hollow vessel requir- 
ing to be humanly filled. No, they will find large contents in the 
passages that they expound ; because they are men well trained in 
creative thinking, and bring that training to bear on scriptural passages. 
My practice in expository work, is, at the start, always, to expound 
the scripture in question myself with what strength I can muster at 
the moment. Somehow that gives me a good glow, the Bible and I 
get on to brotherly and joyful terms with each other, I have laid 
myself down on the heart of it and felt its vigor first-hand ; and 
now if any commentator wants to speak a word with me, very well, 
let him speak ; it will not embarrass me at all. 

Or, perhaps, the sermon to be produced is an altogether histor- 
ical one; a sermon of information. Very well, in that case, I 
acknowledge the first step is to get that information—and that brings 
in reading. But there are two ways of reading; one the memoriter 
way, the mere gathering up of facts, and the other the thoughtful, 
brooding, creative way ; the way that finds great subjects all along 
in the stark events.of history, so that they are not stark (not at all) 
but eminently relational and prolific. The sand-atom is stark, the 
seed-atom is not, and history is a seed-ground—it is so in fact, and 
it is so as read by original and originating minds. 

So I do not see but my—Think first, and read afterwards, holds 
pretty well all around. 

III. We have now reached the third step in the making of a 
sermon. We have our topic; we have assembled our materials ; 
and the next thing is to organize those materials ; for let it be said 
to the credit of human auditors and congregations, they refuse to be 
blessed to the full by unarranged and disorderly masses of sermon 
matter, thrown out with whatever fine delivery, or whatever moral 
earnestness. It must be organized. And in that business of. organi- 
zation, a real master-workman has a good chance to show himself. 
Anybody, almost, can drag together the timbers for a building, but 
only a person of skill and invention can do the next thing. 

Now, the materials which you have amassed, can be put together 
and made an orderly unit, in half a dozen ways—perhaps more ; 
on what principle therefore shall you select one way rather than 
another? I reply, if you are going to organize your subject simply 
as a subject, and not as a means of good influence on your hearers, 


YALE LECTURES. 23 


perhaps there are a number of ways of doing it; but as God’s ser- 
vant sent for the salvation of men, you do not want to be a man of 
subjects and no more ; you will surely fall out of your vocation and 
be a lecturer, and intellectualist, if you go on that principle—one of 
the most mournful forms of suicide ever heard of; a called man 
lapsed from his calling! God save you from that. 

So you must ask yourself, in every case—what do I wish to 
accomplish with this sermon-stock that I have on hand. When that 
is settled, the form of the organization to be made begins to be set- 
tled. Get your aim, and every least item of your stock of material 
spontaneously shapes itself to that aim; as all things followed the 
music of Orpheus. A clear aim, firmly held, works the following 
results. | 

It saves you from treating your sermon as a work of art, and 
fashioning it under an artistic impulse merely. When it is finished 
it may be a work of art, sermons frequently are ; but it has come to 
be so incidentally and not of your set purpose. Your purpose was 
to bless men, and in so far as your discourse is after the forms of art, 
and is therefore beautiful, that high and lordly intention of yours 
did it. Let it not be thought a strange thing that a God-fearing and 
noble intention should thus show an esthetic result—the pitiful thing 
is that such an intention does not always secure an esthetic result. 
Every minister has a right to have his mind work beautifully as well 
as truly, so that while truth-lovers shall admire it, people of taste 
can too.’ In the several provinces of art, literature, painting, music 
and sculpture, it is often said that the artist ceases from real art, 
necessarily, the moment the thought of utility or human advantage | 
in his work is permitted to take hold of him. If he undertakes to 
be a preacher to men he is no longer an artist, and his work shows 
it. That is the idea. 

No doubt, many who were by nature preachers, and who greatly 
desired to do good, have resorted to art-forms, as the means to their 
end, and have marred and mutilated art by thus harnessing her in to 
their purposes of utility; but that was because they were preachers 
and not artists—it being possible (though not easy) to be preacher 
and artist in one ; possible but not easy—not easy, for example if you 
write a novel to impress a truth, and would never have thought! 
of writing the novel excepting as that truth had possessed you ; 
almost certainly the strenuousness of your moral intention will warp 
you away from the absolute exactitudes of the beautiful—so that the 


24 YALE LECTURES. 


safest rule for ministers and sermonizers is, take a good aim at the 
needs of the congregation and let high esthetics take care of them- 
selves, considerably. If they get into your sermon, very well, but 
do you keep your utilitarian intention as a preacher, high up, 
strong, steadfast and solemn. 

The second use of getting an aim before you proceed to shape 
the materials of your discourse is, that you thus save yourself from 
all divergencies and rhetorical dallyings as you pass on, from all 
unprofitable self-consciousness. Multitudes of sermons are much 
occupied with their own selves. They stop to make nosegays. 
They stop to posture and make themselves agreeable. They stop to 
see how good an argument they can make. They fall into a mania 
for minute elaboration. They are detained in forty allurements. 
Meanwhile, the people out there who are listening to that sort of 
sermon have a great deal of leisure to admire the fine points made 
and praise the rhetoric, and say within themselves—‘“ What a tre- 
mendous preacher we have.’”’ That preacher has forgotten to have 
any aim. Those men in the pews, if really addressed and yearned 
over, could not get a chance to make those leisurely remarks of 
theirs. Preaching is in order to salvation, in God’s idea, and if the 
sermon went for that point-blank and forever, it could not be 
otherwise than a sermon of a certain sort—a sermon that is, free of 
every dallying, every ambitiousness, all posy-work, all self-con- 
scious smartness. . 

And I may add, it would be likely ‘therefore to have unity, 
which is an indispensable virtue in, all expression expected to take 
a mighty hold on men. 

And once more, in a single word—an explicit aim, as you begin 
to consider your materials of discourse and try to pull them into 
shape, will show you what paits of the mass may be omitted from 
the organization you are about to make—omitted as not relevant to 
the purpose which you have chosen. 

I want to testify, though, from out of my own experience, that it 
is curiously little of that material you will be called upon to discard 
ordinarily. As arule, you can work in nearly the whole of it, and 
make it serve an orderly use in your discourse—the reason being, I 
suppose, that each item of the whole is related to every other item ; 
that relation being caused by the fact mentioned by me before, 
that the entire accumulated mass came in as brought in by a mind 
in a particular state, as filled by a selected topic. It is a pleasure to 


YALE LECTURES. 25 


know this, for when we have laboriously got our sermon together in 
the crude stock of it, our feelings are hurt to be compelled to throw 
away any of it. . 

It has been the sin of my life that I have not always taken aim. 
I have been a lover of subjects. If I had loved men more and 
loved subjects only as God’s instruments of good for men, it would 
have been better, and I should have more to show for all my labor 
under the sun. As I look back upon this defect, the principal con- 
solation I have is that a Christian subject, even when it is unfolded 
simply for its own sake, may have some wholesome magnetism for 
the people who have contact with it. 

I have spoken thus far of a supreme aim at the welfare of your 
hearers, as a very great advantage in several respects, but especially 
in this fundamental business of getting your sermons organized ; 
but that business is so fundamental, and your sermon is something or 
nothing so entirely according as it has some good shape or not, that 
you must pardon me if I din on organization a little longer. Given 
an aim, some things are settled, but not all. It is settled that no 
sort of stock and stuff must come into your discourse that is inhar- 
monious with that aim. And it is settled that whatever stock and 
stuff you do put in, shall be so put in as to consort with that aim, 
and further it. 

- But very likely there are several conceivable forms of organiza- 
tion under which these necessary particulars will be reasonably 
well-secured ; and we want to know now how, out of these several 
forms, the right one may be hit upon. 

Here I bring you face to face again with the differences be- 
tween men—the differences original and the differences acquired. 
In some kinds of mental work, one man is as good as another—just 
as in the humdrum of ordinary life a coward is hardly distinguish- 
able from a hero; but as in a great emergency, (in shipwreck, for 
example,) the awful dissimilarity in men suddenly stands out, and a 
day of judgment is come, so in certain sorts of intellectual perform- 
ance there are men and _ men, and a single hero may be worth an 
acre of ordinaries. 

One sermonizer has but to look at his sermon-matter and it 
straightway trots into organization, like the horses of a fire engine 
when the alarm bell rings; but another man fumbles his materials 
for hours, and then hasn’t much of a sermon. The first man’s 
sermon is a shapely tree, the other’s just manages to be a tree, 


26 YALE LECTURES. 


but in all sorts of disproportion. Still, the intuitiveness of that first 
man, and his supernatural mastery over the stuff in hand, while at 
first it may seem to you just an ultimate fact, and beyond all ex- 
planation, a simple, direct endowment of God, it being God’s 
prerogative to elect A to intuitiveness and Z to fumbling and the like ; 
behold, it certainly is not altogether an unanalyzable fact. The out- 
springings of intuition are the composite result of original en- 
dowments, and of good training, and of much practice. 

Millions of people had seen apples fall from trees before 
Isaac Newton saw his apple and guessed the law of gravitation—a 
magnificent out-jump into the unknown. Why did not they all 
make the jump? First, I confess, because they were not the jumping 
kind, perhaps, most of them. Weare notall born to the same thing. 
But secondly, because Newton by long study, and a large ingather- 
ing of scientific data had provided for himself a first-rate standing 
place for a great and infallible jump. He did not launch forth from 
the known into the immeasurably unknown, on the gush of a simple 
impulse to launch. That sort of stone-blind irrepressibility is of no 
account. ‘There is no law in its movement, and it never comes to 
anything. It would not guess gravity in a hundred thousand years. 
But Newton, I say, while he did not lack impulse, had a considerable 
knowledge of the secrets of the physical universe, and quite an ac- 
quaintance with the way things are wont to goon out there—just as I 
can prophesy on the as yet unknowable parts of a man’s life, whom 
I have summered and wintered with, and variously taken to pieces 
in my analysis. 

So then, your intuitive organizer of sermons, is thus expert 
because he has studied his business, and has exercised himself a 
good deal in experimenting on the principles he has discovered. 
He has discovered that an aimless organization is void of one first 
principle of organization in pulpit discourse. He has discovered— 
perhaps some one told him and perhaps not, but he has found out, 
some how—that there is a philosophical way of formulating a dis- 
course, and an unphilosophical way ; a way in which one thing leads 
on to another according to the eternal and universal laws of thought, 
and (what is more), according to the profoundest of those laws, 
and a way in which one thing springs out of another by a connection 
so shallow as to amount to practical incoherency ; and he has dis- 
covered that the incoherent way confuses the people who listen to 
him, and thus steals away their right to get some good out of the 


YALE LECTURES. o7 


time they spend together—also he has discovered that his own mind 
when called to make a discourse on an unphilosophical plan, has 
seven times the labor and affliction to get on, and get out, that it 
need to have, just as you and I may tug ourselves to death trying to 
handle great weights that a porter will manage easily, because he’ 
applies his strength in a rational manner. Also, our sermonizer has 
discovered, that if for any reason he or his people wish to remember 
his sermon, if it is philosophically put together, they can remem- 
ber ; whereas, if it is unphilosophically put together, neither he nor 
they can retain it except by one of those absolute and stark acts of 
memorization which may be very interesting as phenomena and as 
showing what the human mind can do when thoroughly put to it, 
but which are a dreadful strain to the average man, and are of no 
special value, either, in the general development of the mind. Per- 
haps the minister preaches memoriter, or perhaps he preaches from 
a brief, and in either case his work of recollection is trebled if his 
sermon is fortuitously thrown together, or is developed from point 
to point under the lesser and more trivial laws of mental association, 
rather than under the great laws ; as where his.score of memoranda 
gathered by original effort at his desk, or gathered from books, are 
made to root all in one comprehensive thought and sentence. 

I could illuminate this matter much more, if I could take time 
to spread out before you actual specimens of rational work, and of 
incoherent work, in sermon-making. 

But I was praising the intuitive organizer, and trying to let some 
light in on his secrets. First, he has brains to some extent, though 
not necessarily to any alarming extent ; and secondly, his discoveries, 
one and another—such as I have just enumerated—he has experi- 
mented on. He has made aimed discourses—and unaimed ones. 
He has made discourses on philosophically articulated skeletons, and. 
he has made them on ram-shackling and forbidden skeletons. 
These forbidden and impossible skeletons he invented when he was 
young and had not practically learned the differences of things, or 
when he was too weak to do other than impossible things. Latterly, _ 
since he became knowing, he has practiced the logical sort of plan, 
the philosophical, the genetic plan, wherein one thought vitally out- 
branches from the thought foregoing ; the plan rememberable, the 
plan that is a plan (and the only one that deserves the name). 
And now his mind walks in among his accumulated memoranda, 
like a farmer into his harvest fields ; and lays things out in orderly 

5 


98 | YALE LECTURES. 


swaths, in absolute unconsciousness of the principles on which he 
operates. See that girl pound that piano! She knows the principles 
on which she is operating—to her sorrow, and may be to the 
sorrow of all listeners. But see her ten years later. She just 
careers, without a thought of principles. She has passed out of 
love into gospel and moves unlaboriously and lyrically. Likewise 
there may be a lyrical organization of a sermon—a spontaneous 
rightmindedness therein ; a philosophical movement full of melody 
to the inner ear, because philosophical—for a profound orderliness 
is always musical to the appreciative mind. | 
The question is sometimes raised, how plainly a preacher had 
better show to his congregation the skeleton in his sermons. I 
should say, as a rule, just about as plainly as he shows his own 
skeleton. If there should ever come up a serious doubt among a 
people whether their minister has any skeleton, he had better show 
one. A purely unformulated and gelatinous physique in a public 
man were disagreeable, and fitted to give his congregation a painful 
sense of insecurity. I have heard numbers of men complain of 
Ralph Waldo Emerson, when they had just heard him lecture, that his 
mind meandered from point to point in almost unmitigated hap- 
hazard. Said a clerical friend of mine—a bright man too,—* it 
sounded as though he had opened his scrap-book and given us page 
after page of that, consecutively—for a lecture.”” I knew better— 
for there was never born a more coherent man than Mr. Emerson 
in all the substantials and profundities of coherency—and I never 
could have had the face to ask him to appear any more consecutive 
than he did ; but, perhaps preachers do well to show their skeletons 
often enough to create a general feeling that they always have them. 
In some instances it may be desirable, for some reason, that the 
people carry away the sermon in a form to report upon; in those, 
let your plan come forward into unmistakable visibility—the heads 
and all the members, italicized and full-spoken. But more often than 
anyway I think it is just as wellto keep your frame-work a little retired. 
I do not believe that the highest kind of discourses, the intensely 
vital and powerfully magnetic ones, the sermons that are most full 
of their author, in his totality and his inspired vehemency—I do 
not believe that kind enjoy being shown skeleton-wise. They do 
not care to be remembered, in their details, by the people. If only 
they can make all minds alert, and all souls warm and assimilative, 
while they go on being delivered, they are satisfied—those sermons 


YALE LECTURES. 29 


are—as convinced that they have thus accomplished their highest 
possible good. Sermons of instruction, systematic courses of sermons 
on points of divinity, may well be put into a form to be easily 
remembered, but sermons of quickening are different. They can 
quicken enough, without much display of structure. If a sermon 
is a real birth and out of a man’s living interiors, and not a mere 
mechanical result of the constructive intellect working among ob- 
jective material, it will always have a thoroughgoing, reasonable 
plan; precisely as each individual of each species of animals, as 
being an outcome of life, will have an unmistakable, and specific 
and satisfactory skeleton ; but these vitally-born sermons will always 
incline to be a little Emersonian, and modest, in their display of 
plan. And they can afford to be, that is, they can afford to lose 
what force and consolation there may be in a plain skeleton, because 
they are so charged with the elements of life, and are so life-giving. 

It is time for me now to remark : 

IV. Fourthly, and lastly, on that agony and despair of many 
inexperienced sermonizers, called amplification; amplification, I 
say, which in strict definition is not making a few thoughts go a 
long way, by powerful inflation, but clothing your outlined sermon - 
in a full-sounded corporeity of actual, ponderable thoughts, all of 
them relational, of course, to that outline with its first, second, 
third and fourth, of main thoughts. 

Let me draw an illustration of this matter from the lecture I 
am now delivering. 

First, I resolved to give a lecture here on sermon making. 
That was exceedingly notional, and well nigh inevitable, because I 
was to address for a few weeks here, a congregation of embryo 
sermonizers. . 

Next, I resolved to have the scheme of my lecture on sermon 
making stand thus: The topic of the sermon—The accumulation of 
the material—The organization of it in a suitable scheme—The 
amplification into the full written form. That scheme grew out of 
the fact that a sermon has in it those essential particulars—and it. 
was therefore just about forced upon me. It is good to have the 
path of duty made plain by a powerful press of circumstances. 

Under the first head—The Topic—I got all the amplification 
I could delay upon out of the idea that sermonizers had better be 
quite free and copious in their range of topics. And there I might 
have stopped, but I paused long enough to put on a rider in the 


30 YALE LECTURES. 


cautionary remark, ‘You must be careful to make this your wide 
sermonizing, your selection of topics from the entire creation, safe, 
by keeping your ever-sermonizing mind intensely Christian.” Sev- 
eral other items of amplification occurred to me which I did not 
use. This, for example—how shall a man determine the order of 
his topics ; by the order of the Christian year as in the Protestant 
Episcopal Church ; by the ever-fluctuating state of his congregation ; 
by a pre-arranged round and round of theologizings, and appli- 
cations thereof to life; by the to and fro of his own mental 
idiosyncracies ; or by what ?—a fruitful inquiry, you see, and having: 
amplification enough in it for an hour. Moreover, I had thought I 
might mention this curious: little fact:—that a topic selected on 
Monday, say, snugged away in the mind, and let alone there, 
absolutely, for three or four days and nights; not being brooded 
and worked over at all, I raean ; on examination at the end of that 
time, will be found to have sprouted into a very considerable affair 
—your mind has seen to that unconsciously—you have had nothing 
to do with it—and (what is stranger still) experience proves, (my 
experience does) that if youhad been sound asleep all those four days, — 
some sprouting would have come to pass. Scores of times after I 
have gone to bed Friday night I have made a little stir in me, and 
got my next Sunday’s sermon decided on, and then on waking 
Saturday morning have noticed a marked advance in me of that 
topic—it has swollen—it has put out feelers and drawn in correlative 
thoughts—very likely it is all ready for me to begin writing on. 

That was one of my intended amplifications. And still another 
amplification that invited me, was a careful statement of the reasons 
for my assertion, that a wide array of topics is better than a narrow 
one. 

Now notice; another lecturer, even if he had had the same 
scheme, would have made a different amplification of that first 
head, The ‘Topic—where then do amplifications come from, and 
how can a poor, dry-minded, constipated mortal gettnem? Ianswer: 
there is only one way, and that is to amplify the man. At any rate 
that is the first thing. I know, some if amplified to the extreme limits 
of human amplification, would not be voluminous amplifiers. Their 
organ of language is small. Or they have an inborn silentness like 
Gen. Grant, and the North American Indian, and like many a big- 
headed and much- -thinking man in the back-country. Thomas 
Carlyle used to preach that amplification is the worst known cure, 


YALE LECTURES. 31 


and Mr. Emerson seems to nave been caught in the same sorrowful 
idea now and then—as for instance, when he wrote :—‘“ come now, 
let us go alone a whole Pythagorean lustrum, and be dumb.” 

That doctrine may do for some, but not for ordained preachers. 
What they want is volume and facility. And the way to get it, I 
say, is to make the preachers themselves voluminous. That first. 
Any natural silentness in them can be dealt with after we get them 
enlarged. We don’t want the dam opened till there are waters back 
of it. That was what angered Carlyle; that there should be so | 
much openness, and sound, all around, and so little real flow. 

The amplification of men, as preliminary to solidly amplified 
discourses! A large subject. But there is where discourses come 
from—from men ! 

For example :—When I said—a preacher’s subjects should be 
taken from a wide field, I said it out of the observation and study 
of many years. When I said, a thoroughly Christian mind in a 
preacher will surely christianize all subjects that come into it, I said 
it as having noticed that, hundreds of times. When I said, a whole 
Friday night’s unconscious incubation on an idea, will hatch out a 
sermon often, I said it because I have hatched them, and know. 
When I said, under another head, that if a man goes to his study 
and sets his mind bubbling on a subject, and faithfully records every 
bubble, those recordings will be mutually related, and will take their 
place naturally therefore in the sermon which he proceeds then to 
organize out of them, and not one bubble be lost very likely ; I said it 
out of my own experiences on the point, repeated hundreds of times. 

An amplifier then—a real one—a solid one—a nutritious one 
—an amplifier, who, while he has some diction, is not all diction— 
an amplifier whose movement is a reiterated ‘birth-throe and an 
eternal refutation of Carlyle’s doctrine of silence,—such an one has 
lived years and years (this business takes time, and a young man need | 
not despise himself if he does not feel absolutely inexhaustible right 
off)—he also has read a good deal, has read digestively, and with a 
constant appropriation.of facts, principles and vitalities—moreover 
he has done mountains of solitary thinking—he has become a me= 
thodical thinker ; that is, when his mind moves down upon a subject 
it does not go helter-skelter like a flurry of volunteer citizens into 
an enemy’s country, but with the organized orderliness of «an army, 
wherein each man is a two-fold force because a unit in an organi- 
zation. Method is power ;—he has become a methodical thinker, 


32 YALE LECTURES. 


also he has learned that most teeming of all secrets, the secret of 
analysis; and now, whatever subject comes under his inspection, 
suffers what the nebulae of the firmament suffer when brought under 
the astronomer’s glass; what is single becomes plural, and the 
plural more plural, in an endless process of separation. In nothing 
are sermonizers more differenced than in this; one moves in large 
and excessive discursiveness, and gets his amplification by sweep- 
ing into his sermon a great amount of external material, anecdotes, 
history, personal recollections, the last book, the last murder, and 
so on, (all good when well used,) which he has come across in his 
objective travels ;—the other man chooses a single thought, or 
principle, (the more single the better,), and proceeds to explicate 
it, fundamentally ; he runs it back to its roots, he knows before he 
begins that that thing so simple and innocent-looking on the face 
of it, has any amount of contents; more contents than he will 
know what to do with when he gets into them. So he gets into 
them, he defines, he analyzes, he analyzes again, he pursues things 
into their relations, he finds that the universe is one great ganglion 
and that any subject is a universal subject ;—the good amplifier has 
learned to analyze, I repeat ; and finally (for I must hasten) he has 
been through a multitude of joys and sorrows, he has known love 
with its many zests and its many inevitable lamentations, he has 
seen the dying die, he has looked out on the wide woe and mystery 
of life, he has become full-hearted and full-minded, and now, when 
he is called to face assemblies of mortal creatures and speak to 
them, he has somewhat to say, and he feels sometimes as though he 
could speak forever. He may not be voluble, (God forbid) but he 
is heavy laden with meanings, and oftimes in his common sayings 
you will catch the flow of a deep undersong, just as in many a 
word of Jesus, given us especially by St. John, it has sometimes 
seemed to me, for the moment, that I could scarcely endure them, 
they are so fraught with seriousness, and tenderness, and forebod- 
ing, and moral firmness and majesty, and I know not what besides, 
as of a man speaking out of an infinite experience, out of an 
infinite meditativeness, and out of infinite agitations of sensibility. 
A great man makes a great sermon, and O! what clear effects of 
greatness are made now and then by quite measurable and even 
moderate men, who have turned their powers into the service of 
God with a complete consecration, and have opened themselves to 
the infloodings of his blessed Spirit. 


YALE LECTURES. 33 


My Brethren, I should naturally end here with some attempt 
to discriminate between a sermon and a lecture, my idea being that 
a sermon gets to be a sermon, and saves itself from being a lecture, 
by being made, and delivered in the Holy Ghost. 

I had thought to cover that ground on another occasion, but I 
shall not, I see now. 


ORIGINALITY IN THE 
PREACHER. 


I am about to speak to you on originality in the preacher and 
I will try, to begin with, to get down to some clear and vindicable 
conception of Originality. Accepting a clue from the word itself, I 
should say that an original sermonizer is one who originates the 
thoughts that he uses. That seems obvious. But a man who does 
that is sure to have certain other peculiarities springing out of that ; 
and, in the popular apprehension of the subject, therefore, an origi- 
nal man is one who not merely originates the thoughts with which 
he stocks his sermons, but also has thoughts in practically unlimited 
quantities—they swarm him ; and, moreover, they are very observa- 
bly different from those of other men. 

An original preacher then, has those three marks. First, his 
thoughts are his own ; next, he is fertile in thoughts ; and next, he 
is different from other men. ‘Those three elements, I say, enter into 
the general idea of Originality. In strictness, he is original who 
originates ; but he who originates, is therefore prolific, and unique ; 
and it is sufficiently exact for our present purpose, if we include all 
that under the one term original. 

But now, as to that rather great matter of origination, let me 
ask :—-Where do our thoughts come from? When a preacher origi- 
nates his own, where do they come from, and when he gets them 
somewhere else, where is that somewhere else? An important 
question for men who are public preachers and-who are required to 
speak ten, twenty, thirty, and more years to the same congregation, 
except as the perpetual play of death and birth withdraws a familiar 


YALE LECTURES. 35 


face now and then, and sifts in an occasional new mind: Where 
shall thoughts be found, and where is the place of them? Many a 
young man in the first agonies of production, feels like replying, in 
those other words of Job: “ Man knoweth not the price thereof, 
neither is it found in the land of the living. The depth saith, it is 
not in me, and the sea saith, it is not with me. * * It is hid 
from the eyes of all living, and kept close from the fowls of the air. 
* * Where, O where, shall wisdom be found and where is the 
place of understanding.” And even middle-aged ministers, of a 
certain second-grade sort, are not without a touch of the same 
lamentation at times. ‘ Why did you leave Philadelphia,” said I toa 
partially light-weight doctor of divinity—‘ Because I had nothing 
more to say,” he replied, frankly, from the bottom of his heart. 
And after a few years, I noticed in the newspapers, that he had 
moved on again. He hadn’t yet discovered the hiding place of 
wisdom. A friend of mine summed up that whole class of preach- 
ers under the head of “squeezed oranges.” Their first one, two or 
three years, exhausted their entire sap, and since that, they have 
been in a condition more easily felt than described. A condition in 
which, let me add chirkly, no man has any need to be. I consider 
it no egotism to say that I never saw the day when I was not 
pretty conscious, that the fountain which gave me my last discourse 
was more than able to give me another, and then another and 
another, in everlasting undiminished flow. Of course when you 
' have takén out of yourself several thousand sermons and small talks, 
you know your own mind something better than you did when you 
had taken out only a dozen ; and are more assured of its bottomless 
fecundity ; but I courageously maintain that every mind (except a 
fool) is bottomless, and as non-exhaustible as the waters of the sky ; 
and if that Philadelphia man touched bottom in his mind, it was a 
delusion-——it was not bottom—he did not know how to handle his 
own mind—he had not come into the secret of generative intellec- 
tual methods—he might as well say he had gone down the whole 
sub-marine five miles ofthe Atlantic Ocean, and was able to declare 
its shallowness. 

_ But where do thoughts come from? They come from just two 
sources, namely: from your own interiors, and from the manffold, 
endless exteriors, by which all men are surrounded :—these exteri- 
ors being gotten hold of by redding, and by. observations and by 
experience. As to thoughts from the interiors, I may say of them, 


36 YALE LECTURES. 


that doubtless even they are heavily charged with exterior elements 
—that is, all of a man’s reading, observation and experience, his 
whole life-long, has gradually passed into his structure and substance, | 
to make his originating mind exactly what it is at any given moment 
of origination, and to make any given product or thought of his 
mind precisely what it is; but those exterior elements are not in him 
in any way of recollection ; in that thinking of his from the interior he 
is not conscious of exteriors ; his whole feeling is like Belshazzar’s ; 
I did this—this idea is mine—nobody told it to me—I never read it 
anywhere—or, to draw on Job again, this path no fowl knoweth, 
and the vulture’s eye hath not seen it; it is my secret, my child, 
bone of my bone, and flesh of my flesh—just as the spider says 
proudly :—“ that web is this individual spider spun out,” although 
all the while he knows, if he is an educated spider, that the inward. 
material of those fine yarns, are the amazing result of the vital pro- 
cesses of his body, taking the various external spider-foods and work- 
ing them over by some unsearched chemistry into a brand new 
form ; a form as unlike the component foods of which it is made, as 
mud is unlike the heaven-white lily into which it runs up. 

It is the one distinction then, of the class of thoughts which I 
have called thoughts from the interior, that they seem to themselves, 
and are, in-born, in-generated, not beholden to any conceivable 
thing in the universe for their origin, excepting to that live mind there 
privately thinking. 

Now, I suppose that most persons, at first, would say :—only 
such a thinker as that is original; and the preacher who gets his 
sermons from the great second source of possible supply; the source 
objective, books, nature, life, the million-voiced say-so of the much- 
speaking human family, he is not original; he is a borrower, and 
very possibly a plagiarist :—he is not a conscious plagiarist in most 
cases, but if his discourses are remorselessly looked into, it will be 
found that they have a strong savor of other people, and do not 
savor enough of his own self—he certainly is not original ;—the 
original man pours forth always from his own contents. 

All that is true, but it is as possible for the profusely objec- 
tive man, the great reader, the great observer, the great man-of- 
affairs, the great memorizer of facts, events and minima, the excur- 
sive and wide-plundering man, it is as possible for him to be origi- 
nal in the profound and self-evolving way already described, as it is 
for the man who never reads, and never observes at all, but sits in 


YALE LECTURES. 37 


his studious solitude, in severe abstraction, and takes good care that 
what thoughts he has shall be his own and shall smack most relish- 
ably of his personality. . 

I admit that, if a man leads an intellectual life strongly exter- 
nal, and is a diligent in-gatherer, there is danger that his original 
powers will be buried under by his acquisitions, and he therefore 
not be original; but this bad result is not necessary. If he thinks 
more than he reads, if he spends more time over his riches of mate- 
rial when collected than he does in collecting it ; if while he is col- 
lecting it, he is analyzing it, searching for its underlying principles, 
generalizing upon it, in short, rationalizing on it in the use of all the 
higher forces of his mind ; if he reads reflectively, critically, rumin- 
atively, judicially, and does all his excursive work in a thoroughly 
attent and vital way, then inevitably what happens to the spider 
happens to him; the foods of his mind become mind, they increase 
his mass and his potentiality, they modify the quality of his intellect, 
they are subtly distributed through his entire mental organism, his 
entire personality, in fact, just as all our physical food atoms, after 
proper transmutation, are infallibly distributed for the repair of our 
bodies and the replenishment of their vigor. And when all this has 
happened to our much-reading man, and he is called upon to put 
himself forth in discourse, behold! there is nothing plagiaristic 
about him ; he falls now under the first class of thinkers, the indis- 
putably original men, he is not conscious of his materials, neither is 
any one else aware of them; the fact is, those materials have eter- 
nally disappeared in him, and all you see is a man; an originating 
man :—theoretically we know that there are a great many good books 
in that man and a great grist of other things, a sort of maelstrom he 
is; but visibly we cannot prove it, we cannot lay our hand on the 
books and the grist; when he speaks, it sounds just as Adam 
sounded in Paradise before he had read a thing or fairly seen anything ; 
his contents are all vital and assimilated, and the only way you 
know he ever read anything in particular, is the same by which you 
know a strong and digestive eater, namely, his mind has blood in it,. 
and endurance and endless performance and when he gets hold of 
you, you feel that your doom is at the door. 

_I like to describe this sort of God’s creature. There is some- 
what magnetic in him and the touch of his splendid virility is enough 
to make one feel himself immortal. 

I suppose you have seen these thick-set, sappy, disgusting green 


38 YALE LECTURES. 


worms, that stretch themselves out on the twigs of the trees and 
lazily eat the green leaves, and eat, and eat, forever; and are so 
lazy that they will not take the trouble to transform their green food 
into a decent flesh color, but lay it around on their miserable bodies 
unchanged (so it looks—I use the language of appearance, of 
course.) Well, those creatures represent the preachers who are 
overloaded with undigested externals. The leaves they have eaten 
show everywhere. You can tell what they ate last. Sometimes 
they put it forth in plain lumps, the original thing without a pre- 
tense of reductio ad pabulum, though more often it is disguised un- 
der some show of transformation. But it is a low and stealing 
piece of business—the whole thing—and they have no right to 
preach. 

But whereunto shall I liken the better sort? They are like 
yonder flowering bush. It has lived on several kinds of rather un- 
promising food. It has eaten dirt. It has even taken up the insuf- 
ferable rankness of animal decomposition. And, better and more 
decent, it has nourished itself by the air and the light, and the rain, 
and the subtle cool ministries of the night. And lo! the rose. 
That plant had life, and vital cunning, and knew what it was here 
for. That plant was original. It needed much material, but it did 
not propose to be lumbered by it. No, it struck for a complete 
victory over its material—and got it. For what can be more com- 
plete than to make over dirt, and the like, into a rose-leaf, that 
blooming, beautiful, fragrant, and almost spiritualized thing, a thing 
so exquisite that God might pluck it for himself in heaven. There 
is originality for you. 

The flower is original ; the green worm is a visible plagiarist. 

If I have now sufficiently defined the original preacher, I am 
ready to draw out a list of considerations in defence of originality 
and in praise of it. 

And, First. Referring to the original man, as different from 
other men—dwelling a moment on that particular element of origi- 
nality, I submit to you this fact—that every mind born into the 
world is specifically unlike every other, by the operation of irresis- 
tible causes ;—as much unlike certainly, as each human face is unlike 
every other that ever was or ever will be ; which fact does not look 
at all as though God meant his creatures to be otherwise than dis- 
similar one from the other. If the new-born mind is in every case 
unique and unprecedented, why should it not be developed in the 


YALE LECTURES. _ 39 


line of that original start. Why rub down its face-marks in a blas- 

phemous attempt to make everybody alike? Why conventionalize 

it by slow degrees! Why work over its aboriginal tone, till you 

could not tell it from all other tones. God does not operate in that 

way in Nature, neither does he thus work anywhere. Every animal 

has his race-lines, every tree has its race-lines, every plant its char- 

acteristic career. Even that sappy green worm—to tell the truth at 

last—is a perfectly individualized creature, and when he is green, it 

is not because he has consented to let the leaves he eats register ex- 

actly their own color on him, but because as he proceeds with his 

digestion and what not, it is a peculiarity of his constitution to pre- 

fer to be green, just as it is constitutional in the lily stalk to prefer 
to blossom white, and in the rose to prefer that fascinating flush of 
which I spoke. Likewise, every spring is itself and no other, and 
every morning is, and every cyclone; and every tide-swell has its 

recognizable idiosyncracies. Likewise, in the unfoldings of history, 

God strikes in to make the great movement racy ; each era has its 

own features, each crisis gets to be a crisis by foregoing preparations 

that are original, and each crisis dissolves away into the common 

flow of events again in a manner quite its own. 

Why then should any one be afraid of originality in men, and in 
preachers. Why want to have us all twins, and fac-similes! all 
think alike, express ourselves alike, look alike, sound alike, in a 
weary, universal humdrum of thought and life. I recollect the perils 
of originality, and shall throw in a cautionary word or two on that 
poin by and by. Meanwhile, let us all accept our birthright, and 
calmly be ourselves. 

Again, only those who are original speak with authority. There 
is a tell-tale tone in the hearsay man, which he cannot suppress. I 
suppose it is the ineradicable integrity of the man’s nature, refusing 
to put off on the public a stolen thing. He wants to do it, and in- 
tends to do it, and tries to do it, but lying is cross to certain princi- 
cipal parts of our nature, and no bad thing can be perfectly carried 
out, thank God. Murder will out. So will borrowed preaching. . 

When I said, those who are original speak with authority, you 
thought of our Lord, I presume; as you well might, because the 
entire secret of his weight of speech, was that he spoke what he 
himself had discovered and nothing else, and had discovered a good 
deal to speak. There were traditions enough in his land, and in his 
training ; there were prepossessions, prejudices, bigotries, a powerful 


40 YALE LECTURES. 


quantity of book-lumber oppressing the public mind and a thoroughly 

‘elaborated and imperious conventionalism, after the manner of all 
very old countries and races; and into this great system of fixed 
things, and respectable things, and things prescribed, Jesus came 
with his wise, direct, intuitive eyes, his absolutely unbiased mind, his 
eyes of infinite, original discovery, and what he saw he said, with the 
calmness and courage of first-hand knowledge. On the one hand no 
egotism and on the other hand no flinching ; and those people who 
massed about him and listened, felt a power which they could not 
explain, in any full analysis, but which they explained well enough, 
and better than they knew, when they said :—‘ He speaks as one 
having authority, and not as the scribes.”” He was an original man ; 
and his ministers have a right to be, in their measure. 

Every now and then the travelling agent for some book wants 
me to put my name down in certification to the value of his volume. 
“But I never read the book,” say I, “and I am so situated at 
present that I cannot read it.” “But here is a list of eminent 
clergymen and others who have read it, and are all delighted with it. 
It is the safest thing in the world therefore for you to give me your 
name.” ‘To which I reply :—‘ Nothing were safer, as respects the 
risk that I shall lend my name to a poor and sloshy volume ; but 
my name there written in your great array of names will be taken 
by many people to mean that I have myself examined your book 
and do therefore and thus know it to be a good thing. Not one in 
a score of the people, taken as they run, would surmise that I am 
not an original witness in this business. Almost the whole value of 
my name lies in their lamb-like trust in me at exactly that point.” 

So the man never gets my name. Iam not going to be a 
public preacher for that book merely because a body of intelligent 
doctors of divinity, a hundred strong perhaps, together with a hun- 
dred laymen equally intelligent, have discovered it to be an excel- 
lent publication, and are preaching for it. 

And I do not see but, in all preaching, the original witness is 
the only one. My Brethren, it is one of our main distinctions that 
we are witnesses for Christ. Theoretically, that is according to all 
Biblical teaching on the matter, we are that; and then, so far as 
public power is concerned, we do not amount to anything first- 
class, and irresistible, except as we are witness bearers. In other 
words, we must deliver our own thoughts—or what is the same 
thing, we must be original. If we dispense theology, it must be 


YALE LECTURES. 41 


strictly the theology which we ourselves have been able to discover ; 
or if we passs over into the emotional field and discourse on matters 
of experience, we must get our great emphasis out of our own expe- 
rience, and in so far as we preach the experiences of other people, 
unverified as yet in our own hearts, our perceptive hearer will note 
that there is somewhat hollow in the resound of our emphasis. A 
photograph of a landscape is one thing, and the photograph of that 
photograph is another, always and most visibly. It may be a nice 
picture, this last—in fact it generally looks smoother and handsomer 
than the other somehow; moreover the natural scene of which it 
professes to be a representation is plainly there—nevertheless every- 
body much prefers the first photograph—there is a refreshing real- 
ism about it—it is a transcript of the originality of Nature herself 
—it is, as we say, an original picture. 

So the preacher ; in order to be realistic, he must tell what he 
knows, and not be dressing up the discoveries and experiences of 
other men. 

But here some one of you in his own mind will interpose the 
suggestion—‘ We young men, have not had time to discover much, 
neither have we had any great range of experience ; nevertheless we 
are on the eve of being preachers, and we are on the eve of being 
overhauled by an ecclesiastical body, which will want us to have a 
clear opinion on all theology, and will very likely withhold ordina- 
tion if we cannot stand up to all the Articles of Faith of the Chris- 
tian body to which we belong ; And now, Mr. Burton, what shall we 
do? We can’t be original very much, we can’t be witnesses more 
than about so far, and yet we seem to be about to be forced to talk 
very large, and talk from one to two hundred times in a year. 

Well, that does seem to be a crushing state of things, and I shall 
enjoy remarking upon it. 

I think it is plain that you must retail some hearsay, but in so 
far as you are incorrigibly honest to the bottom of your heart, you 
will instinctively put forth your hearsay with some subtle indication, 
somehow, that it is hearsay. 

A friend of mine was once put in a tight place. He was called 
upon to act as showman to a stereopticon, for an evening. Half of 
the views to be exhibited were taken from Europe north of the 
Alps, and half from Europe south of these mountains. Now 
it chanced that my friend had never been south of the Alps, and, 
as I had, he urgently besought me to mount the stage when 


42 YALE LECTURES. 


he had done northern Europe and do the rest. But I 
declined, feeling and saying that he could beat any of us, 
whether he had visited the scenes ornot. For he had, in large 
measure, the gift of speech. So I went to the lecture with perfect 
confidence, but awondering in the secret depths of my mind, after 
all, whether the lecturer would slow any when he crossed the Alps. 
At first he did not. He had got up a good momentum, and he 
went over kiteing and struck Italy with the realistic air of all ob- 
servers. It seemed to me that he was going to take us through that 
new country and not let out his ignorance. But he had been in the 
ministry a good while, and his conscience began to bother him, I 
suppose, and he pretty soon seemed tired, and at last stopped and 
confessed. He said he had not been there, but would go on as well 
as he could. And he went on and was most interesting, too. I 
would not have had him stop for the world. 

Gentlemen, when that council ask you, as a member of my or- 
daining council asked me by way of determining my soundness on 
the subject of the Trinity :—‘ If the Holy Ghost were killed would 
it kill God ;” do you say :—“I will make shift to answer, but I am 
young to the councils of God.” Because it will be interesting to 
have you answer; and a comfort. And after you are settled, and 
must preach on many things that you have not been able as yet to 
explore in thoroughly original effort, when you go over the Alps, 
you may reasonably slow up a little. I should certainly go over. 
There is a south-lying Europe—a rich} beautiful, historical region ; 
and the fact that you have not’ been there does not alter that. Mil- 
lions have been there. So you had better glib along and tell what they 
say. It would be dreadful to confine your congregation to Northern 
Europe, merely because that is the only part you have visited. 
God’s creation is pretty large. And his grace-region is pretty 
large. And what we cannot personally visit, we had better read 
about, and then proclaim as hearsay. There are plenty of wit- 
nesses to certain points of doctrine and experience on which you 
are not a witness; you are too young and you have not thought 
enough nor prayed enough—and you thoroughly believe their testimo- 
ny, and therefore, when you give it out to your people you need not do 
it in a half and half way, though you can never really thunder and 
boom, and jump into the emphasis with your whole weight and in 
perfect gusto, except when you are displaying the north country 
scenes. 


YALE LECTURES. 43 


And your people will let it be so. They are not fools, neither 
are the ecclesiastical councils fools. All sensible councils prefer 
that the young mah should not be too knowing. They like to hear’ 
which way he is headed, and what he best likes, and a few things of 
that sort—and they like to toll him out into deep-sea soundings to 
find how well he can tread water, and whether he is honest enough 
not to pretend that his feet touch bottom—and after that, and pos- 
sibly a flirt or two of gymnastics among themselves, unnecessary but 
entertaining, they are ready to go on and do the thing that ought to 
be done, namely, put the young man into the ministry with con- 
gratulations, thanksgivings, and their best love. 

It is not easy to draw the line between Authority in religious 
things, on the one hand, and Individual Liberty on the other—or 
rather, the line is easy enough, but it is hard to live exactly upon it. 
The line runs thus : 

In so far as I can search for myself I must do it—in all things. 
That is Originality. Next I must diligently take counsel of other 
men, and listen to them with absolute openness of mind. And 
now, having gathered in all possible data, I must next fall back upon 
my ownself, in perfect absolutism ; or call it individualism if you 
like—in perfect individualism I must fall back. Perfect I say, that is, 
in a spirit as absolute as though no man but me had ever thought a 
thought ;—and I must decide—decide my doctrine, decide what is 
real, divine experience. Whoso flinches at that point of absolutism, © 
waives his indefeasible right, and smirches his own majesty. I tell 
you there is no manhood that does not begin just there. Surrender 
there, and you have opened the way to every conceivable self-sur- 
render and worthlessness, both moral and intellectual. I know 
the risks of Individualism, and what a force of disintegration it often 
is ; social life is not possible, the state, church and family are. not 
possible, history as an organized development cannot be, and 
civilization itself in its highest forms must die, where the Ego is 
pushed as some would push it. But I know, also, that where men 
cease to do their own thinking and make their own decisions in the » 
manner and under the conditions just explained, there are no longer 
any men, and the various social organisms are not worth keeping 
up. Their constituent units have dissolved into imbecility, and so- 
ciety is like a rotten-timbered ship. 

It is much asserted now-a-days, that the spiritual Ego is not 
much i a thing anyway. In the first place it is not spiritual, but 


44 YALE LECTURES. 


material. In the next place, it is not self-directing and free, but is 
the slave of irresistible conditions, its environment, and all that. 
In the third place, of course this Ego is puffed out at death into 
eternal non-entity. 

And now what are the sure barriers against this flood of mate- 
rialistic philosophizing? The first barrier is a supernatural religious 
experience in millions of men, and the glorious self-consciousness 
that comes of it. A man regenerate, and full of regenerate experi- 
ences, always believes in his own spiritual existence, his own free- 
dom of will and his own eternal perpetuality. And he justas much 
believes—and cannot help it—in a personal God. Those three 
faiths, hang together, logically and in life, and the more regenera- 
tions there are on earth, the less materialism there is. 

That is the first barrier, and the greatest. 

But close to that, is that resolute Individualism, of which I was 
speaking—that manful assertion of the Ego, which is involved in 
private judgment. If I think for myself, if I produce my own 
thoughts, if I settle my own principles, if I make my own discov- 
eries, and if, even when I consult other people, and genially con- 
sider their dicta, I come back at last to the plain ground of my own 
kinghood, and make up my affirmative, the whole thing is so in- 
tensely self-asserting and so amplifies and classifies my self-con- 
sciousness, that I cannot in the least endure this modern scientific 
attempt to minimize the inner Me, and woodenize it, and make it 
a two-penny item in the inevitable grind of mechanical cause and 
effect. 

Possibly the point I make here will seem to some speculative, 
rather than practical, but I believe that the true way to resist ab- 
sorption into the creation, as a part of its dead machinery, is to 
magnify the personal interior man, practically, first by filling it with 
the life of God through Jesus Christ, and then by original energiz- 
ing in the form of truth-searchings, and in the form of independent 
judgments. 

And if I might turn aside a little here, I could speak of indi- 
vidualism as indispensable to civil liberty, and as the only foundation 
of a masculine and powerful literature. But, I was praising origi- 
nality in the preacher, and to that I return and once more announce 
to you, that originality in our ministers secures a many-sided con- 
sideration of all subjects—and nothing else will secure it. It is a 
peculiarity of our subjects that they are many-sided ; and the heavi- 


YALE LECTURES. 49 


est pull that I have, I find, is to get on to all sides, by the help of all 
sorts of men. Left to myself, and following the impulses of my own 
constitution, I select certain aspects of the Christian Religion, in 
front of them sit down, and there enjoy myself forever. But along 
comes Mr. John Calvin, and invites me to take a turn with him, 
He has numbers of things he wants to show me. “Your position is 
good enough so far as it goes,” he says; “ God is love and the will 
of man is free enough to make him responsible, but God is justice. 
too, and God foreordinates in the most impressive manner, and I 
want you to walk all around that, and mortise that into your theolog- 
ical system, and let your system have the advantage of it; and 
you too.” 

But, by the time John Calvin is through with me, Horace 
Bushnell wants him. He has discovered some things, he thinks. 
And before they have finished with each other, Huxley, Tyndall, and 
Herbert Spencer, are waiting for them both. Calvin and Bushnell 
with all their divergency, one from the other, are agreed that Chris- 
tianity is a supernatural system from first to last, and those three 
naturalistic gentlemen just named have come to expound the side of 
Law, to them, and to show that the law-system of God has never 
been breached in one instance. All religions are a natural devel- 
opment, they say, Jesus of Nazareth was a product of his race and 
his circumstances :—a splendid product confessedly, so that unre- 
flective, unscientific, and wonder-mongering men and generations, 
naturally enough got him deified, and encompassed his earthly way 
with marvels, heaven-descended and miraculous. 

Christianity, (these gentlemen go on,) Christianity has been ex- 
hibited by theologians as a system so. without parallel in other re- 
ligions, and in Natural Religion, that it seems a kind of strange 
work of God, an eccentricity, an irruption ; whereas, in truth, Chris- 
tianity is an orderly factor, and an organic factor, in God’s vast 
framework of things, and all it needs is time and study, to show its 
many affiliations with all the great Faiths of the world. That is 
their talk, and the two theologians listen to it, and get a new sense 
of the law-side of things, and they begin to wonder—many theolog- 
ians do at any rate, whether, in preaching the supernatural and the 
miraculous, we have not been too-prone to show the irruptive and 
abnormal element in it, rather than its large normalism. A miracle 
is a startling and unclassifiable thing, certainly, on its hither side ; 
but if it be looked at on its transcendental side also, may it not be 


46 YALE LECTURES. 


found to be part and parcel of a thoroughly-established, universal, 
undeviating orderliness ; so that while a miracle, when it comes into 
sight on the earth-side, is very sensational in its rupture of the cus- 
tomary flow of things, it is even more imposing as a law-abiding unit 
in that totality of created things of which one hemisphere is the 
natural, and the other the supernatural. When the supernatural 
plunges into the natural there is a commotion and the dust flies, and 
we say God has started up suddenly to do by direct fiat, what would 
not have been done had he kept his repose, and permitted his crea- 
ted laws to move on; but he has not started up probably ; the 
scientists are right; his laws are moving on and it was they that 
made this plunge, and this dust. 

I have drawn out this illustration rather fully, because it does 
illustrate my idea that many minds working independently con- 
tribute to the unfolding of truth in all its phases. My joyful con- 
viction is that the perilous rationalism in the field of natural science, 
which is one of the most obvious and most striking features of the 
intellectual life of the present time, will do forty times more good 
than hurt in the expansion and enrichment of our conception of 
Christianity. And it will do it in two ways. It will secure a just at- 
tention to aspects of truth which have been too much retired ; and 
it will cause such a hard-headed, and scholarly re-examination of 
truths which have not been retired, but have been held prominent, 
and made to be the Malakoff and Redan of the Christian position, 
that they will be reconfirmed with shoutings. 

Nature is as truly a revelation of God as the Bible is. Nature 
is an immense theological statement—and every attribute of God is 
found in that statement, but some attributes more distinctly than 
others. Those distinct attributes the unbelieving naturalists are 
bringing out—though they do not intend it, for they take little stock 
in the idea of a personal God—they are doing good theologiz- 
ing for all the rest of us :—and if our theology has confined itself 
too much to a Book (as I suppose it has,) the labors of these bright 
gentlemen will surely supplement our deficiency. 

And then as to the broader establishment of old truths by the 
laborious gainsayings of these men, take this example :—they say 
that Jesus was a purely natural result; given the Jewish race, the 
Jewish land, the Jewish history, Mary the Virgin, Nazareth, a few 
simple this-world things like that, and the great Nazarene is fully 
accounted for. So then we are all invited to study, exhaustively, 


YALE LECTURES. 47 


those this-world things ; and the more we do it, the more it stands 
out as never before that Jesus came from out of the sky in the main, 
and could not have been born of Palestine only. 

In- like manner, various disparaging assertions touching the 
origin of the Bible, and touching numbers of sacred things, have led 
to such a sifting of the same as was never known; and continually 
the result is, that our Religion, in all its substantials, is gloriously 
vindicating itself. 

And if we come to the controversies among the men of faith, 
as to the inspiration of the Bible, and the Passion of the Lord Jesus, 
and the eternal lot of sinners and all the rest; these controversies 
have sprung up because our men are intellectually independent and 
original—when they put their eyes on a thing, it is their own eyes 
that they put on, and that thing therefore is seen in all sorts of pos- 
sible ways, and some impossible ones; but no matter—what Ed- 
wards does not see, Wesley will, and what Wesley does not, Edwards 
will. Some sensitive man does not cordialize with Calvin’s view of 
God’s penalties. That is his personal specialty; to be sensitive. 
Whether it was that his mother was the woman she was, or that he 
happened to fall under special forces of training, I do not know; 
but there he is all in a quiver against the Calvinistic theology at that 
point. But he is a good man, and a man of mind and scholarship ; 
he begins certain hypothetical reasonings on the old doctrine, to 
see if he cannot get it into some sort of sufferable shape ; and per- 
haps not tear the heart out of it, either. Now, what I say is, that 
that man, moving freely and having no doubt of his right to be in- 
dependent, will be likely to hammer out some statements that even 
Calvin will be willing to hear. In his horror of the thought that 
God should come out against his finally impenitent creatures, in ob- 
jective strokes eternally laid on, he will carefully unfold a man’s 
Hell from his own interior, and show him as forever in the grasp of 
intellectual laws already well known. And what other ameliorations 
defensible or indefensible he will surmise, we cannot tell; but it is 
good to have just that man—that kind-hearted (perhaps over-kind 
hearted and over-shrinking,) well-furnished, determined man, tug- 
ging with all his might at just that point. Multiply these indefatiga- 
ble explorers by thousands, and you see what is seen in newly-dis- 
covered gold lands ; every rod of the theological landscape is nu- 
merously searched, and every ounce of its dirt, for a thousand miles, 
is microscopically sifted in some’gold-searcher’s pan. And that is 


48 YALE LECTURES. 


what we want. Our theology will be a whole orchestra, when all its 
tones are discovered, instead of a squeak here and a squeak there 
of some sectarian view, or some provincialism or some passing 
aberration of the century. 

I have spoken in praise of originality, in a pretty affirmative 
way, you have noticed, but I have no objection to slip in a touch of 
prudence here at the end. 

Egotism and vaporing, and a despising of authorities in the in- 
tellectual and religious world, is a thing easy to fall into when your 
soul gets full of the doctrine of originality which I have preached 
here to-day ; and self-assertion, and an opinionated air, and a brag- 
ging way of exhibiting one’s originality, is not beautiful either in 
young men or in old ones—therefore consider a moment. 

If you pursue originality for its own sake, or because it feels good 
to be original—or if you pursue it for the sake ofa sensation, among 
the people, and because that feels good ; then you are clean out of 
the way, and your originality is disgusting. It seems to me I should 
not pursue originality at all. There are many things that are good 
to have but you must not pursue them. You must go straight along 
about your business, and let them come of themselves, if they want 
to, just as right-minded maidens get their lovers. But what is the 
business that you are to go straight along about, and in which origi- 
nality may incidentally come to you? 1 might give several answers 
to that. If you are in passionate pursuit of the truth, all strutting as 
of originality will be taken out of you. Or if you have a passion to 
do good to the congregation to whom you preach, that will do it. 
Can I think of my sermon in a conceited way when my whole heart 
is out in the assembly before me? As well could the runner in the 
games think of his gait, or the swordsman in the duel delight in the 
glitter of his sword. My Brethren, God puts us, his ministers, in a 
very testful position. On the one hand, we must make sermons ; 
we must make good sermons, we must ram into them tons of stock, 
we must spend days on each one, and work over it in such a con- 
centrated and devoted way that, when at last it is finished 
and the agony is over, we cannot help feeling a mother- 
like self-satisfaction in it; and then when we go into the 
pulpit, we must deliver it decently, and give enough attention to our 
ownselves to secure that end; and yet, on the other hand, we just 
as much must keep clear of self-consciousness, and a loving sense of 
our own discourse, if we are tc please God and bless the people. 


YALE LECTURES. 49 


There we are. And the curse of the preaching of many of us is, 
that we have not the strength to do those two contrary things, and 
do not go to God sufficiently to be led out by him into the great 
motives and enthusiasm in which self is swallowed up ; the enthusi- 
asm for Truth, and the enthusiasm for Humanity. You see your 
peril, Brethren, and you see your remedy. Sermon-making is in 
order to salvation. Sermons are instruments, not ends. ‘A good 
sermon is a sermon that is good for something,’’ as I once heard an 
old minister remark. 

And Originality is for use. You want to be original because 
that is God’s method for the intellect, because thus you are a dis- 
coverer of truth, because thus your mind is made prolific, because 
thus you are saved from plagiarism whether formal or virtual, be- 
cause thus you do your part towards the eventual exhibition of 
Christian truth in its many-sided entirety ; because thus you are a 
real witness for God, because thus you continually increase your 
personal mass and momentum ; and because all these particulars 
bear on the glory of God, and the welfare of man. 

Some would say, it is well enough for great men to be inde- 
pendent and original thinkers, and to move before the world in that 
gait—their size saves them from being ridiculous—a sort of impe- 
rialism is becoming to them, and people put up with it; but for 
little men and young men to assume to be original, and courage- 
ously do their own thinking, is rather intolerable. It can be made 
intolerable, but it is as possible for a small mind to work by the 
method of originality as for a large one, else I should not be deliv- 
ering this lecture ; for more than half of the ministerial minds are 
smallish. Moreover, a little man has his duty to his own mind, and 
to his congregation, as much as anybody has. You might say :-— 
yonder bit of a man has no moral obligation because of his lack of 
size ; but he has. And in like manner, yonder undergrown intel- 
lect must take good care to think rightly—not in servile dependence 
on strong men, but originally—-and if he does, his intellectual forth- 
puttings, while they will not be stupendous or over-numerous, will 
be always fresh and have a sound of authority. 

But in making them our own the point of strain, as I said, is, 
to keep ourselves perfectly modest, and perfectly receptive of the 
light of other minds. Absolutely firm on the one hand, and abso- 
lutely genial and inoffensive on the other. Striving to be firm, we 
may seem conceited, dogmatic, and repellant. Striving to preserve 


50 YALE LECTURES. 


our intellectual integrity, and the courage of our opinions, in the 
stress of the world’s innumerable yea and nay, we may get accused of 
intellectual pride and forwardness, and of many things; especially 
if we are young. 

Well, let us watch and pray, and do the best we can. 

I look back with amusement, now, to the intellectual self-con- 
fidence with which I left this Seminary after Dr. Nathaniel Taylor 
had spent a couple of years or so getting me on to my own legs; 
and whereinsoever I stood a little more than perpendicular, I take 
it back of course, but I bless the memory of that very affirmative, 
self-centred, and undoubting old man notwithstanding. He knew 
in whom he had believed, and why he had believed, and he made 
us all feel that truth is discoverable, and that we could discover it, 
every man of us, and that we did not need to be badgered out of it 
by the noise of gainsayers ; and that a man’s a man, in theology as 
in some other things ; and that it is better to go to the judgment 
after a life-time of manful strugglings with the truth albeit with some 
errors, than to go there with whatever amount of truth held in mere 
languid receptivity. And he was right. 


IMAGINATION IN MINISTERS. 


I am here to day to make a plea for Imagination in Ministers 
considered as Theologians. | 

I do not know whether any previous lecturer has made a whole 
speech on that faculty or not. Some of the lecturers have had 
the faculty themselves, in great size, but perhaps they would be 
afraid to encourage people generally to have it. I heard so con- 
siderable and judicious a man as the late Rev. Dr. Joel Hawes, 
Pastor for a life time of the First Church in Hartford, Connecticut, 
give an account of his high-handed proceedings, in the days of his 
youth, against imagination in his own mind. He found, he said, 
that he was pretty strong and exuberant in that trait, and that his 
sermons were showing it. So by and by, when traveling alone and 
thoughtful in his carriage all the way from Hartford to New Haven, 
he improved the occasion for a solemn deliberation on the ques- 
tion :— how can I do the most good in my life time, preaching 
imaginatively as now, or otherwise.” I need not say to those who 
knew him, which way that debate went, nor with what success he 
enforced on himself his resolution then made, to extirpate that 
perilous endowment of his. 
Dr. Hawes stands for a multitude. They are afraid of imagi- 
nation. And they have good reasons for it. I am afraid of it. I> 
am afraid of every power of the mind. I am afraid of mind—and 
body too. Allthings have their risks and perversions. And I had 
thought that I would say to you here, to-day, just where the danger 
comes in, as respects imagination in the preacher. I could tell 
you all about it; but I believe that the dry vision, and the one- 
eyed vision, the literalism and the non-creative habit-of the un- 


52 YALE LECTURES. 


imaginative men has cursed theology and the pulpit even more 
than the sky-flying and moonshine of the imaginationists. 

But I cease from comparisons, and from all preliminaries, and 
proceed directly to illustrate the wholesome function of this great 
power of man in the minister considered as a theologian—or a man 
theologizing. And under that head I notice: 

First. That, the imaginative man—and he only—is able to 
handle, and draw out, liblical doctrines historically—to take it, that 
is, in its entire historical setting. For the word of God on theology 
is not an absolute utterance straight down from the skies, and direct 
from his lips, but it comes to us very circuitously through human 
lips, and many human lips, and through all sorts of human and 
‘earthly intermediates; and a full-visioned and creative grasp of 
those numerous intermediates is an essential part of good theologiz- 
ing. When God would make himself known in his fullness, he 
chose to be incarnated in the person of his eternal Son; that pre- 
existent and infinite personage took upon himself the conditions 
of time and sense ; he dropped into an order of things historically 
prepared for him bya long and laborious process, he became a 
vital factor in that order of things, he accepted ail the relations 
prepared to his hand, spoke in a certain language for example, was 
of a certain country, dwelt on a certain spot, in a certain home, was 
nursed and cultured in a certain religion,—and, in short, made his 
whole manifestation on earth a relational and conditional one, so 
that he cannot be fully understood in the least word he spoke, or 
the least act he performed, except that he is interpreted by those 
conditions, or relations in which he stood. We must resurrect his 
era ; not only in its outlines, but in all its essentials. We must res- 
urrect Judea, as it then was. And when we get hold of Judea to do 
that, we shall find that Judea intertangled with other nationalities, 
so that we have undertaken, in fact, a kind of general resurrection. 
And if Judea intertwined with contemporary peoples, so it did, O! 
how wonderfully, with the peopled and providential past; so that 
to possess ourselves of Jesus of Nazareth, as he actually and totally 
was, a time-man and historical phenomenon, we need the magnifi- 
cent clear vision and creativeness of the imaginative faculty, as 
these modern times (to their praise be it said) are finding out. 

Historical imagination! an indispensable first thing in the 
theologian. 

But some one in his heart may say to me here :—“ Cannot any 


YALE LECTURES. 53 


man of good sense and decent memory, without a grain of imagi- 
nation, by diligent study of any past—as the past, for instance, in 
which Jesus organically stood—re-construct that past, and have it 
live before him in its full-toned actuality, so that any one of the 
many forces and personages of which it is made up shall be judged 
by him in a valid way. Is it not claiming too much for the imagi- 
nation to say that it only is able to draw out the theology of the 
Scripture, and the theology of the Christian ages, in a strictly his- 
torical spirit and method !” 

In answering this question, I must make a little analysis of that 
mental power which we call imagination. I will not undertake a 
complete definition, but I will point out some of the marks by 
which it may be known. For all the purposes of this present dis- 
course, imagination may be divided into imagination recollective, 
and imagination creative. Imagination recollective, places before 
the mind things absent or past which we have personally seen, or 
which have been brought to our knowledge by hearsay and study. 
Imagination creative, takes those re-produced absent or past things, 
and out of their many elements makes new combinations ; as when 
a painter puts into his landscape not any one natural scene, but 
particulars and parts of many scenes with which he is familiar. 
As regards the historical construction of theology, whereof I have 
been speaking, imagination recollective figures there; that to 
begin with ; and if I am asked,—how does imagination recollective 
differ from memory, and does it differ at all,—I reply, only in this, 
that it presents to the mind things absent or foregone in a vivid way, 
and after the manner of literal vision. Things merely recollected 
seem distant and cold, and to that extent void of result ; things imagi- 
natively recollected seem near, warm, vital, and inspiring. A 
recollective theologian, by virtue of an enormous gift of memory, 
may have an encyclopedic hold on the theologic past, but he holds 
the past as Encyclopedias are apt to, in a colorless way, and with 
no special human interest. The imaginative theologian moves 
among those by-gones, all and utterly alive, and visional,—as much - 
so as though he had been personally among them, and of them, 
originally. He cannot see that a man, or a deed, or a nation, or a 
social process, or a system of thought two thousand years away, is 
any less actual or thrilling than the same thing in these days. 
When some one disparaged Plato in the presence of Dr. Amold, 
Arnold’s lip quivered with grief. A memoriter man ‘could not have 


54 YALE LECTURES. 


been moistened in that way, by whatever outrage against all con- 
ceivable Platos. He would be abundantly acquainted with them, 
the Platos, of course, but as frigid historical entities, and not in 
any flesh and blood warmth and nearness. 

A few years ago, accidentally, it was found that underneath old 
St. Clements in Rome—itself one of the most antique of churches— 
was another St. Clements, which had been buried and unknown for 
over a thousand years. When I was there, the portico and nave of 
that edifice had been dug out, and Father Mullooly, of the Domin- 
ican Monastery near by, conducted a party of us through it, with 
explanations. As we passed in he called our attention to the mar- . 
ble threshold, half-worn out by the passage of countless feet in the 
long-gone times, and said :—“ there are a good many foot-prints 
on that stone ;””—and to me, instantly, those living generations were 
there again, and I felt the mysterious pathos of human life in their 
persons as deeply and emotionally as I could in any human com- 
pany of to-day. That sentence of Mullooly’s was coined in the 
imagination—distinctly. It was not memory. It was not his 
intellect grasping a fact. It was feeling warmed up to vision. It 
was imagination, one of whose distinctions is that it is always suffused 
with sensibility :—it was imagination revivifying triumphantly those 
dead and shadowy great multitudes by a single unconscious master- 
stroke—such as are easy to that imperial faculty. 

And Father Mullooly by this little touch, classed himself right 
in with Shakespeare, in many a passage of his plays. It required 
precisely the same mental qualities to re-people that old Nave, and 
tie a thousand human years to that foot-worn marble, that it did to 
make Hamlet reclothe the bare, dead skull of Yorick which the 
grave-digger had thrown out, and which Hamlet held in his hands, 
saying: ‘Alas poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio, a fellow of infi- 
nite jest, of most excellent fancy ; he hath borne me on his back a 
thousand times. * * Here hung those lips that I have kissed, I 
know not how oft. Where be your gibes now?P—your gambols? 
your songs? your flashes of merriment that were wont to set the 
table on a roar.” Is Hamlet remembering there? Anybody could 
do that. Perhaps Yorick’s dog could. But the dog could not thus 
re-enflesh that skull; re-create those living lips, and make them 
merry again ; and give poor Yorick a live and actual visit to the 
earth once more. _ 

That was imagination ; in one of her minute works to be sure ; 


YALE LECTURES. | 55 


only manipulating a skull; but herself entirely, nevertheless—her 
intuitive and total vision, her deep feeling, her weird mastery of 
materials. It required only a glimpse of her stately gait to reveal 
Juno, only his perfect O to reveal Giotto, only the one tone ‘‘ Mary,” 
to reveal to the Magdalen the risen Jesus ; and in like manner, one 
slightest word may suddenly disclose a royal imagination in its 
entire characteristic power. 

But, to get back to theology once more, I want to say—what I 
have already slipped along into—that when imagination recollective 
has done her whole work in any given case—as in the reproduction 
of Jesus of Nazareth, or of the Christian theology—and has put the 
past before the mind with great clearness, it has in fact passed on 
into imagination creative. We may have a clear knowledge of the 
constituent elements of an era; those elements may stand before 
us in the most vivid and visional reality ; but if we stop there, we 
are not in full possession of that era. We are right where the 
painter is when he has assembled the several views, and snatches of 
color and rude studies, out of which he will make his landscape. 
I spoke of imagination creative as that by which we combine things 
recollected in such shapes as they never had before ; and that was 
a true description. But I must say now, it is likewise a creative 
"act, to take the contents of an historical era for example, the hun- 
dred details which you have gathered in their separate literality, 
and organize them into a conception of that past as it stood when 
on the stage here, an organized and living unity. Am I making 
myself as clear at this point as I would like? It were possible to 
assemble the elemental contents of arose. There they are as plain 
as day. But you are not within a hundred thousand miles of a rose. 
Can you organize your elements? Can you get them together and 
make them grow and flush, and be fragrant, and be, in fact, a rose? 
No—only a Creator can do that. 

Well, call the era of our Lord a rose. I, a memoriter historian, 
have heaped together for myself that miscellany of information 
touching that era, which is the era, in its atomic form. And there 
Iam. I have imagination enough to look at those accumulated 
atoms in a pretty living and warm way. They are invisible, but I 
see them. They are long-past things but I get them near. And I 
brood them with quite a fructification of interest. But I have not 
my era yet. This sand-heap of atoms of mine is not that era as it 
was to the people who took part therein. They did not dwell 


56 YALE LECTURES. 


much. on atomics when they were laughing and crying, loving and 
hating, and tugging in the thousand-fold thrill of their living-time. 
What I want is, that time with its thrills, flushes and throbs, a cor- 
porate unit of life; and to get that I must be a Creator. I must 
have creative imagination. That final act of the mind by which 
the era—that inert Adam—is made a living soul, is beyond all analy- 
sis, | presume; as much so as God’s act when he made the first 
man. And I do not know whether any serviceable rules. can be 
given for the creation of that creative faculty. Ishould not wonder 
if a man must be born to it. But if it so happens that he is born 
to it, then he can cultivate it, or kill it (as Dr. Hawes killed his). 
My notion is that he had better cultivate it—and I am using this 
lecture to show the splendid uses of the faculty, in order that I may 
make you feel that you had all better cultivate whatso of it you 
may have. It is a high-blood steed with a fearful amount of vigor 
and possible rampancy, but so much the better if only you once get 
it harnessed and at work. A horse might be so lumbering and 
sleepy as not to be worth harnessing. In theology we do not want 
any such faculties as that. 

But dwell a moment longer on imagination creative. Perhaps 
there lingers in your mind a doubt whether the living reconstruc- 
tion of an era after the manner just described is a creative act—is 
it not rather a purely formulative act. Well, you would not call it 
a formulative act merely if a painter worked up a dozen different 
scenes into one original scene. That would certainly be creative. 
He has made something never before seen, or thought of. 
But I cannot see that his work is any more truly creative 
than is the painter’s who throws upon his canvas any one 
view in nature provided he gives the view in its entire and pro- 
found significance. As*a matter of fact, the greatest landscapes 
the genius of man ever produced, are, as a rule, copies of single 
actual scenes—their greatness consisting in this: that they have 
made those scenes the medium of all expression, whether moral, 
spiritual, or esthetic, that can be thrown into them. And when I 
read the great Poets of Nature [ find the same thing. By their 
profound and phenomenal sensibility they perceive nature’s utmost 
possible meaning, and tell it. That is all, generally. Coleridge 
looks up to Mt. Blanc, with a vision most open-eyed and sympa- 
thetic, and veraciously relates what he sees. Of course, the poem | 
is an eminently subjective one, because in it he has imputed to the 


YALE LECTURES. 57 


mountain many feelings of his own; but the mountain is capable 
of having those feelings put into it; in other words, the mountain 
in its various aspects, movements, and manifestations, is a natural 
vehicle of expression for those human feelings, and may be said to 
have been created unto that end; and poetry reaches its highest 
expression when the spirit of man and the spirit of the universe 
thus completely flow together. When Coleridge, Wordsworth, or 
whoever, reaches that synthesis of those two, and that final ecstasy, 
the creative imagination has done a work than which there is none 
greater ;—and yet the work is simply interpretative ;—it is not the 
making of something out of nothing, neither is it the combining of 
forty familiar somethings into a brand-new result. 

So I like to insist that when the imagination of man is engaged 
in the work of historical reconstruction, making the dead past live 
again, and departed personages revisit the earth, and exhumed 
skulls put on the red and rose of life, she is operating in her su- 
preme, creative, function, and is wonderful beyond all words. The 
annalist does not know much about this. The mechanical historian 
does not. Many a theologian does not. Some teachers of theology 
do not. Some teachers of church history do not. History is in- 
tensely vital; and moves on by a vital advance, and addresses itself 
to the imagination as much as it does to the reason—and in fact the 
reason is not able ever to be thoroughly reasonable until she has 
taken into herself the warmth, vivacity, and sudden-flashing intui- 
tiveness of that other great faculty. It has been thought that in the 
cold fields of science only reason and the remorseless exactitudes 
of logic have place ; but, the truth is, poetry is not more indebted 
to imagination than science is. ‘The brilliant guesses of the sons of 
science, which, used first as working hypotheses, have at last gone 
in among the eternal substructures of knowledge, were the unreas- 
oning outsprings of the imagination, and proved themselves more 
than guesses because of the large and luminous sanity which is 
native to that faculty, and because of its constitutional hunger for 
the real and the true. And as to exactitudes, while the reason has 
hers, the imagination has hers—the only difference between them 
being this, that the exactitudes of the reason are formal, while the 
exactitudes of the imagination reach back to the spirit of things, 
and are the more profoundly exact on that very account. This 
point, however, will get some illustration when I come to the third 
head of this address. 


58 . YALE LECTURES. 


My second head runs thus: 

The man of imagination, and he alone, inclines to see doctrines 
in their comparative importance. It is in this as in picture-making. 
In order to picturesque effects, a painter must have an eye to light 
and shade, and proportion, and perspective, and the manifold rela- 
tivities. The cow in his landscape must have her place, and the 
castle must have its place, and the strong wind in the trees must 
have its place, and the over-flying scurry of clouds, and the human 
persons, and the river winding out into the dim and unsearchable 
distance, must all have their thoroughly discriminated position and 
value, otherwise we are treated, not to a picture but to an outspread 
of exaggeration, confusion and nonsense. Some men paint in that 
way considerably. A Chinese man might, I fancy. His landscape 
is just a flat surface of unassorted magnitudes. It has no maxima 
and minima, but an insufferable array and pressure of maxima. So 
in theology. It is possible to have such a solemn sense of the 
value of doctrines as to make them all infinite, and defend them all 
therefore with the same earnestness ; and insist that they shall all go 
into the creeds, and all be presented in the pulpit, in the very fore- 
ground of discourse; that there shall not be any background in 
theology, in fact—for what do we want of a background, when we 
have nothing to put into it, no doctrines, that is, that deserve to be 
subordinated by being located in that partial retirement. 

Now, my Brethren, all this flat-surface work comes of unimag- 
inative minds. I knew an able preacher once who was unto his 
people, pretty soon, wherever he went, exactly as though he were 
not able, because his entire presentation of himself and his topic 
was a piece of flat-surface work. His solemn voice had no light 
and shade’in it. It was just solemn. Neither had his delivery 
light and shade. It was one prolonged and unvarying earnestness. 
His diction had no light and shade in it. It was all first-class. 
The first sentence was as good as the next one, and the next, and 
the next, clear through ; the last being an unexceptionable duplicate 
of all that went before. If that Homer could only have nodded 
sometimes! But-he didn’t. If he could have slackened his 
seriousness, or his diction, or his holy voice, or his determination to 
do good—if some gentle cloud of humor could have precipitated 
its dewiness upon his discourse at points; if some infirmity of 
colloquialism could have overtaken him ; if the grand sum-total of 
his emphasis could have been distributed less evenly ; sometimes in 


YALE LECTURES. 59 


cumulations and sometimes in hollows, just as the seas, abhoring 
flatness and endless levels, climb up in great tides and storm-lifts, 
and then sink back and consent to be tame a little, while they get 
breath for another run—why ! he would have been far and away more 
effective. Imagination is limber, and variable, because it sees alf 
things relatively, according to the laws of the picturesque ; it delights 
in cows, castles, clouds, winding rivers and human beings; and in 
universal geniality it is willing to have them all powerfully painted ; 
but it knows the difference between a cow and a man, and proposes 
to have them painted accordingly—and when imagination goes into 
theology, she knows the difference between those doctrines that are 
of the essence of Christianity and salvation, and those that are not ; 
and between the spirit of a doctrine and the form. But this will 
come out more evidently under the next division of my subject. 

My third head, then, is that imagination is necessary in order to 
the interpretation of the imaginative parts of the Bible, and a clear 
hold on the realities that lie back of its oftimes highly poetic vocab- 
‘ulary. 

To illustrate. How often in that Book is God spoken of as 
angry and raging, as revengeful, as impatient, as punctilious and 
easily affronted, as blood-thirsty, as treasuring up a personal insult for 
many generations, and as being many things a man certainly never 
ought to be. And the prose man—the unmitigated prose man— 
thinks there must be some element of literality in this,—that God 
has in his mind, something like those several inclemencies. But 
the poetic theologian knows that these mighty adjectives are but the 
tumultuation of the imagination, piling up her sensational images— 
to express something to be sure; something, but, of a truth, not 
this—that God actually has in his feeling the literal counterparts of 
those awful human terms. God is infinitely genial. God is uni- 
formly and eternally genial. God never had a first flutter of impa- 
tience. God never stands on his dignity and resents insults. God 
never in one instance laid an affront away in his memory and 
watched for an opportunity to get in a killing return-stroke. And | 
how could his creatures survive another minute if he were such a 
terrific being as that. But, in the way God enforces law throughout 
his dominions, we have a state of things as though all those adjec- 
tives about him were true words. When we transgress law we smart 
for it, and it hurts us and frightens us, as though back of the law 


were some great personal anger. When the misdoings of some 
7 


60 YALE LECTURES. 


ancestor of mine report themselves in my diseased body, it is as 
though God had remembered those misdoings of his back there, 
and now had a chance to gratify his revenge. When I resist the 
Holy Spirit, and therefore quite lose that Spirit, it is as though 
God would not endure an insult, had lost his patience, had grown 
sullen towards me, and had left me-——perhaps forever. The hither- 
side of these realities is such as to justify those lively and fierce 
adjectives concerning God which I have quoted from the Scriptures ; 
and those adjectives become infelicitous and intolerable only when 
innocent literalists get hold of them, and forgetting the essentially 
figurative character of all language when applied to supersensible 
objects, proceed to practically demonize the Divine Being by think- 
ing of him as actually living up to the whole import of those 
discreditable descriptives. And it seems particularly curious that 
they should thus literalize those descriptives, because the Bible has 
thrown in a whole other class of descriptives which talk in a way 
precisely opposite to those first ones, and seem to be striving with all 
their might to save God’s honor from the aforesaid imputations of 
literalism. ‘The reason of man is a poor broken thing but there is 
enough left of it to see that when the Scriptures set forth God as 
infinitely amiable, and also set him forth as a being of rage, resent- 
ment, touchiness, implacability, and the like, both of those pictures 
cannot be literally true. So the honest, and sturdy old Bible, fairly 
forces us into figurative renderings, if only we have enough of im- 
agination, with its elasticity, to be forced. Back of these strong, 
antithetic terms in regard to God, there is some sort of nature in 
him which they are both trying to describe, and in which they are 
both harmonized. Some fumbling, in so great a matter, is pardon- 
able—inevitable at any rate, considering what lame faculties men 
have—but it is not pardonable to select those eminently anthropo- 
morphic images, hate, vengeance and the rest, and declare them literal 
and no images ; and then fall upon the blander and sweeter words, 
love, patience, tenderness, mercy, long-sufferance and forgiveness, 
and condemn them to be images, with no great and comfortable 
reality behind them. Only just let us have imagination in this bus- 
iness, and we are all right. We can find our way to a fatherly and 
dear God, who, like all fathers, does many a thing that hurts, be- 
cause his heart is so unfathomably tender that he cannot do otherwise. 

Well, the non-imaginative theology, after it has got its Deity of 
wrath, and other traits germane to wrath, proceeds to find in the 


YALE LECTURES. 61 


Bible a correlative doctrine of atonement, and the gist of the me- 
diation of Jesus is made to be its placation of just that Being. 
None of us want to deny a propitiary element in the work of 
Christ ; the manifold language of propitiation found in Holy Writ 
is good and precious language; it is not language misused, any 
more than all those wrath-terms are, on which we have dwelt ; it is 
language designed to point us to some sort of reality in the nature, 
and in the administration of God. What that reality is, I might 
undertake to say if there were time for it, but this I am determined 
to say (and would if it took me a month): namely, that the pas- 
sion of the Lord was not exacted in any spirit of hate, or blood- 
thirstiness, or inappeasable hunger for penalty, or irritability as of 
offended dignity ; and if that passion of the Redeemer had a look 
as though it were thus demanded, or if any language of the Bible 
has that look, it is because the passion and the language alike, are 
images, or terms of imagination; and what the eternal facts are 
to which they would direct our attention, we must discover by 
accumulating all heaven-given terms, types, and acted tragedies, 
and sifting them down to that ultimate and sufficiently awful real 
thing in God, wherein they all terminate and agree. A piece of 
work in which imagination has a principal part. 

But, if a Deity of rages and terrors, implies, and leads on to, 
an inadmissible doctrine of atonement, so also does it lead on to 
an inadmissible doctrine of decrees—election and reprobation— 
and an inadmissible doctrine of Hell, and to a whole system of in- 
admissibles ; which inadmissibles I do not mention as wishing to 
combat them. I care nothing for that to-day, except as in illustra- 
tion of what theology may come to when it is wrought out without the 
limberness, largeness, insight, geniality and intuitive vigor of the 
imagination. Hell is bad enough in its reality, without its being 
gloomed additionally by the over-hanging presence and the glee of 
a Deity such as has been secured by the petrification of the live 
images in such words as anger, and the rest. What men suffer in 
hell, here and hereafter, is so hard to bear, and is so full of terror, 
that, taken in its simple first-aspect, it makes one think of a terribly 
offended, and terribly strong-willed, law-giver; and this natural 
first-thought is worked up in the Scriptural imageries of Hell. 
Then again as to decrees—it is a fact that a certain part of the 
human race are saved, and a certain part are not. ‘There stands 
that fact, overshadowing all life; mysterious and sorrowful to the 


62 YALE LECTURES. 


last degree. The universe of God, man included, is so constituted, 
and the government of God is so administered, that that stupen- 
dous and pitiful result is incessantly coming out,—I was going to 
say, is incessantly secured, as though there might be some intention 
in it, and a theology has been found that has the courage to say 
there is intention in it. Well, the whole thing is so terrific, and 
works on so as with the sureness of fate and purpose, that the 
Bible writers, who always freely use the language of appearance, 
have spoken of God as electing some and cutting off others in an 
exceedingly willful and irresistible sovereignty; at least, plenty of 
the expressions used by them are such as have led many to say :— 
God is that kind of a being, and does such things. And this notion 
of his fateful sovereignty in the moral field, is able to get a good 
show of support from his indivertible, awful, straightforwardness in 
the field of natural law. Imagination says: As Jesus sobbed over 
doomed Jerusalem, so it must be God tenderly reluctates from all 
hard dooms in the creation ; and these ten thousand shows of hard- 
ness in him, and these Scriptural words of hardness, do not mean 
hardness, except as love itself is compelled to be very firm some- 
times in order to be really love, and compass its loving ends, and 
make all worlds glad. 

I do not forget that imagination, in her free way of interpreta- 
tion may smooth down some fearful facts too much, sometimes ; 
taking the love-words of the Bible too literally and unqualifiedly, 
and subjecting the words of wrath, fear and doom to an unjustifiable 
disembowelment; as though, being images evidently, and disa- 
greeable ones, too, they had no rights, as message-bearers to men. 
That has often been done ; I confess it. But what I aim to bring 
out is, that the whole vocabulary of divine revelation, as regards 
things spiritual and transcendental, is imaginative, and must be 
imaginatively received. Without imagination, theology is always 
wrong—with imagination, theology may be right, (approximately), 
and often is. When your terms of revelation are images, and when 
as being images they are gloriously contrary one to the other, on 
the face of them, (as it is their right to be, it being of the genius 
and essence of language that they should be, and as they must be 
if they would communicate the facts of God in their largeness), 
then it is only the image-making faculty in man that can take those 
terms, and get back to their ground of unity in the supersensible 
fact or facts which they are all striving to set forth ; just as in a law- 


YALE LECTURES. 63 


case, when a hundred witnesses testify, each speaking from his own 
standpoint, it needs a mind of some flexibility, and some experience 
of contraries, to find the undoubted kernel of things under that 
mass of information and misinformation: 

My Brethren, I have not half unfolded the use of the imagina- 
tion in Biblical interpretation. 

You are reading your Scriptural Lesson in your Balok 
matter what it is, but I will suppose it is Jesus at Jacob’s well con- 
versing with the Samaritan woman. Take that, out of scores. 
Well, read it with your imagination. You see the scene :—see it, I 
say, as though you were there. The spot, the surrounding land- 
scape, the appearance of the well, the face, form and attitude of 
Jesus, and of the woman, the tone of Jesus when he speaks, calm, 
kind, communicative and deep ; the voice of the woman replying, 
her changing face as the Master leads her on, her curiosity, her 
wonder, her rising earnestness, her longing, her vague grasp of his 
spiritual profundities—the whole picture, considered as a picture,— 
you using all you ever learned of the topography of that region, 
and all you ever learned about Samaritans, and all your study of 
Jesus, using all to make that picture complete, and vivid to your 
mind ; read the lesson thus, and it will not be historical but present, 
not abstract teaching but the teaching of life, not Jesus remembered 
and read about, but Jesus. O! it is wonderful, how real, and interest- 
ing, such passages are sometimes. I have often been so filled by 
them that I’could hardly read at all. My conviction of the divinity 
of the Scriptures has been gained by these realistic touches, these 
imaginative reproductions of scenes and conversations in Jesus’ life, 
more, I think, than in any other way. I shall never be able to de- 
scribe the impression I have sometimes received of the depth, 
tenderness, and grandeur of Christ as a spiritual teacher, and a 
more than man, when I have been simply reading and listening to 
him in his frequent dialogues with the people he happened to meet: 

I heard a Lecture once from a certain man, on his first visit to 
Europe, from which he had just returned. He was a professional 
elocutionist, and he dwelt considerably on the public speakers of 
England, and imitated them. And among the rest, he recited a 
vain-glorious temperance speech which he heard at a mass meeting 
in Exeter Hall, London. And he did it so well, and I listened in 
so much exercise of imagination, that I saw the whole situation as 
plainly as though I had been there. What the lecturer omitted, I 


64 } YALE LECTURES. 


furnished. I even saw the clothes the temperance orator wore ; 
noticed how they fitted him, and of what fabric they were made. 
That, and numbers of other things, I furnished, because my imagi- 
nation was stirred, and I instinctively sought a full picture. And 
the result was this ; two or three years after, I told a circle of people 
that I attended a mass temperance meeting in Exeter Hall; that I 
there heard a certain man speak, and that he said this and that, 
which I went on to recite precisely as I had received it from the 
lecturer. I sincerely told that lie, in complete forgetfulness at the 
time, that I did not myself hear the speech but had only been told 
of it. I had been in England, and in Exeter Hall, and that assisted 
me to imagine the situation, I suppose, but the point I am after is, 
that the imagination has an almost unlimited capacity to see things 
—absent things—historic things—faces that disappeared long ago— 
paintings, buildings, natural views,—vanished sunsets,—death scenes, 
—Jesus at the well,—Jesus at the grave of Lazarus,—Jesus at his 
last Passover in Jerusalem that moon-lighted night eighteen cen- 
turies ago. I do not know that it is best to have your imagination 
make pictures so good that after a little you cannot remember 
whether they may not be realities you have once seen rather than 
the weird work of the mind; but I think I had rather be carried to 
that extreme occasionally, and tell some lies about Exeter Hall ora- 
tors than to hear things, and read history, and pass through life with 
no visional energy, and reproductive enthusiasm, whatever. When 
I read that Judaism and Christianity,are highly elaborated corre- 
lates, and am shown point by point the amazing details of that 
correlation, I want at last to gather up that complex thing, Judaism, 
as in one vast unit before my mind, and that other complex, Chris- 
tianity ; and play them off against each other back there in history 
as in a visible back and forth. When I read that we all rose from 
the dead in the rising of Jesus, I get my best impression of it, by 
picturing it—a magnificent scene. When I read of the Judgment, 
let it be a scene to me. So Heaven,—so Hell,—so the millennium, 
—so the intercession of Christ at God’s right hand,—I do not want 
to hear about them, I want to see them. And in many of these 
things, the Bible assists us to see, and means to make us see. Wit- 
ness its diversiform imagery in regard to Heaven; a place of 
pastures, sweet-waters and plenties, a place of choirs and hosannas, 
a four-walled metropolis of solid great measurements, and of 
precious decorations and resplendencies, gorgeous as.an oriental 


YALE LECTURES. 65 


dream. ‘There are the figures in profusion, and you will do well to 
use them for the refreshment of your mind, and the vivification 
of your conception, and not decline them as sensuous, and confused, 
and too likely to physicalize Heaven. 

Now, so much I have said on the value of the imagination in 
interpreting the imaginative parts of the Bible, (which include 
pretty much all parts). 

I shall add, at present, only one thing more. Years ago, when 
John Bright had just made one of his massive, unflinching, reform- 
atory speeches before the people of England, a displeased conserva- 
tive Journal in London complained that he had no “moral imagi- 
nation”’ as they called it; by which they meant, as was explained, 
that he had not the imagination necessary to put himself in the 
place of an opponent, and appreciate his views. A great omission, 
that, in the make-up of anybody. If some desperate work of 
reform is to be done,—as when Wm. Lloyd Garrison began against 
slavery—perhaps the man who is to do the work had better not see 
the other side too plainly. Horses go best with blinders. What is 
wanted of them is to go along, and not be getting broad views, and 
diversified views, to confuse their minds. So, if old school Calvin- 
ists and new school Calvinists, should sympathetically understand 
each other’s arguments, it might weaken them both, and perhaps 
destroy the schools. Still, I should rather not be a reformer at all, 
or an effective polemic, than to come short of ‘‘ moral imagination.” 
A theologian who cannot carry himself over into another and con- 
trary theologian’s ideas, so completely as to be mitigated and 
temporarily weakened as it were by his plausibilities, has not a 
complete and well-proportioned mind, is not in the way to make 
discoveries, and is an unprofitable leader of the public. Of some 
use he is, I have admitted ; just as sometimes a military leader is of 
special value because all he knows is, to fight the enemy imme- 
diately before him, might and main; and, if whipped, to keep on 
fighting as though nothing had happened ; and therefore never be 
whipped. However, who would choose to be that kind of useful 
man, rather than a captain of all-including comprehension. Speak- 
ing of discoveries, the way to know Calvinism is to go there, and 
the way to know materialism, or dualism, or atheism, is to go there ; 
disagreeable spots to visit, some of them, but you must go—and of 
all the faculties of the. mind, it is literally true, that the only one 
able to go is imagination. You may have so much imagination, 


66 YALE .LECTURES. 


and may stay so long on these sympathetic visits, as to be devital- 
ized by them, and never have any settled opinions ; (you will meet 
such people out in the world, and they are the worst kind of afflic- 
tion to the unimaginative brethren, who always know exactly what 
they believe, and why nothing else has the least reason to be 
believed)—so keep watch of yourself, in your imaginative excursions 
among the Isms, but make the excursions, and get to yourself the 
big sense and human-heartedness that come of them. 

This gift to “‘ put yourself in his place,” is quite indispensable 
to the preacher. Hundreds of able men just miss of success all 
their lives, because they cannot limber themselves to that. The 
point was hit very well for substance by an eminent man and 
speaker, whom I heard thirty years ago say :—The young preacher 
cries—‘‘ Be good—be good,’’—the old preacher says :—‘ My dear 
friends, if you cannot be good, then be as good as you can.” Life 
has taught him what human nature is, and what human nature’s 
difficulties are. He has had some rough times getting his own self 
to be good, and certain parts of him are not even yet made willing. 
Also he has moved about among men, and tried to lift on them, 
and coax them to try to lift on themselves ; and therefore when he 
stands up in his pulpit, he is like a cannonier, who before he 
opened his guns had reconnoitered the position he was to bombard, 
so that he dropped in his shells just right. And then there is such 
a luxury in preaching, when you preach sympathetically ;—such a 
luxury for you and such a luxury for the people. They do not like 
to be fired at by a glib expert who knows guns perfectly but does 
not know men,—who makes first-rate arguments but does not hit 
anybody, because nobody stands just where he aims. Every 
preacher’s eyes are more or less askew, for shooting, until he has 
been over among the people, and appreciates their situation. 

Hence, misshots. The imaginative and sympathetic preacher 


(sympathetic because imaginative) , has two good and straightforward 
eyes. 


IMAGINATION IN SERMONS. 


In my last Lecture I called you to consider the function of 
Imagination in theology ; I now ask you to consider Imagination in 
Sermons. 

It may seem inordinate in me that I give one mental faculty so 
much space, in a brief series of discourses, especially as that faculty 
is by no means the supreme one in the minister’s outfit; but I had 
some things requiring to be said as to pulpit diction, which could 
come in under the title I have just put forth as well as under any 
other, and so I have ventured it. 

I think that in organizing the materials of a sermon, and get- 
ting a skeleton that shall be alive and physiologically articulated at 
all the joints, one goes through a mental operation precisely like the 
painter’s when he makes a picture—an original landscape. The 
painter has in his mind the several features that are to go into that 
picture ;—in other words, he has on hand the materials for it from 
out of Nature’s boundless storehouse. It shall be a sunset in the 
Adirondack wilderness, in the autumn, when -the whole warm 
air shines, and is in a sweet swoon of peace, and pensiveness ; 
a region he has often visited just at that season. In his memory 
and happy mood is everything that goes to make that late-year 
northland what it characteristically is. He will get his lay of 
the land from one locality, his forest features perhaps (some 
of them) from another, his touch of water from another, his 
mountain distances from still another, and possibly he will shed 
through all an individual feeling from his own heart, which those 
places cannot quite furnish ; but which is in no wise incongruous to 
those places :—some added tenderness in the half-sad autumnal 
splendor, it may be, drawn from his experiences in this weary world. 
Now those constituent particulars must come together in his picture 


68 YALE LECTURES. 


imaginatively. It is not carpenter-work he is called to. First, he 
must imaginatively see those sober glories of the Autumn, those 
waters, those trees and those heights. _Notrememberthem. That 
is not enough. ‘That is too cold. He must remember them emo- 
tionally, lovingly, with the vivid reality of a thorough-going interest, 
and that is Imagination as distinguished from recollection. Or, to 
use the terminology of my last Lecture, it is Imagination recollec- 
tive. ; 
Next, he must combine those clearly-seen, beautiful remem- 
brances ;—and he must combine them in such a way that, although 
the counterpart of the picture can be found nowhere in all broad 
Nature, yet it shall be natural; after the precise manner of Nature ; 
just what Nature would have done if she had happened to think of 
it; Nature’s very style. 

He might throw on to his canvass all those artistic recollections 
of his, and thus get what combination there may be in juxtaposition ; 
but that is nothing. That does not make a picture. There is no 
life in it ; no coherency, no proportion, no answering of part to part, 
no naturalness, that is, nothing that Nature ever did or would ever 
consent to do. Nature, as we see her, is the silent rhetoric of God, 
his way of expressing himself, his practical testimony as to what He 
likes ; and all human art, (real art) is simply a loving conformity 
to, or reproduction of his style: which style we suppose was not 
taken up by him arbitrarily, but in deepest reason, or because he 
could not remain a reasonable being and not take it up, if he took 
up any style and expression at all. 

Well, how shall our painter get his divine combination. He 
cannot tinker it up, as I have already said. He needs more than a 
good mechanical intellect; more than reason even :—he needs 
Imagination in its creative function ; not its recollective function, 
its creative—exactly the faculty which God had when he filled the 
primeval voids with his picturesque creations, great and small and 
numberless. I have struck now an ultimate fact of the human mind. 
I asked, how does that man combine? Nobody knows. He does 
not know, himself.- He has in him, as a man made in the image of 
God, a power to create pictures that are not a blasphemy against 
Nature, and therefore are pictures. That is the whole story—the 
whole explanation, I mean. His mental movement in that creative 
act is spontaneous, unreflective, instinctive, instant, and emergent, 
like a birth; a great joy, but a great mystery ; a man-mother he is, 


YALE LECTURES. 69 


and who shall tell how growth goes on in the creative womb. It is 
amazing that a feat so complex as that combination can be per- 
formed so uncalculatingly, and so at a stroke ; a feat so complex, I 
say, for, when he throws his parts together, they modify each other, 
and are therefore no longer the same things that they were when in 
separation. Certain colors kill each other. Stand up a tall man by 
a short one, and the tall one talls and the little one shortens. So 
our painter must discount all those mutual modifications of parts, 
on the instant when he conceives his picture. It will not do to 
rush in all the parts and clip and hew and match afterwards. That 
were botchy. That were to be a mechanic. ‘That were unlike the 
Infinite Creator. No, he must rhyme part with part, and make the 
whole thing sing by a stroke of the Imagination exercising herself 
in her most awe-inspiring function. 

Now a sermon, in its highest idea, is a work of art, if there ever 
was one. It need not be made for art’s sake, or with a predomi- 
nant artistic impulse, the moral earnestness of the minister may fill 
his whole consciousness, so that he has no thought of art and would 
abhor himself if he had—nevertheless when you come to examine 
that outcome of his mind and soul, behold it is artistic; it is not 
merely truthful, it is esthetic, it pleases the taste; unbeknown to 
himself he has wrought a work satisfactory to all the gods; it has 
the effect of a picture ; his numerous items of material are in there, 
in juxtaposition to be sure, but (ten times more than that) in con- 
gruity, in organic coherency, in a wonderful mutuality, each item 
fashioning every other item with which it stands related. So in 
the Apollo Belvidere, limb is joined to limb and function to func- 
tion in an elastic harmony and mutual support and fine equilib- 
rium, which fascinates one like a poem. ‘That is the sermon in its 
perfect form when the Imagination has done its whole work upon it. 

Sermons are oftimes formed in a mutilated way. The forma- 
tive instinct in the author was not strong enough, and the result is a 
living thing, with numerous disproportions. Perhaps it is all dis- 
proportions. The man haphazarded along through it, and you 
would say, that it has no law and order at all, did you not know that 
even disorders have their laws. The higher sort of mind moves in 
philosophical order, and that we all call order, as though there were 
no other. But if the sermonizer moves in the utmost possible incon- 
sequence, and gets from point to point by connections the most 
trivial,—as where the word that happens to be last in each sentence 


70 YALE LECTURES. 


is permitted to suggest the next thought,—even there, there is law, a 
law of association between the thoughts ; so that you have in the 
production an artistic element—a slight one—and are pleased. It 
is not utter madness—though even in madness there are obscure 
links of coherency in the thinking, whereby the mind makes 
known that it still resists confusion and absolutely will not surrender 
to chaos and be a personal entity no longer. 

I might give you illustrations of discourses unimaginatively or- 
ganized—though I need to leave this part of my subject pretty soon. 

Sometime since I prepared a line of discourses on Old Testa- 
ment personages, in which I proposed to know, myself, all that 
could be known about those several men and women. So I made 
my studies rather prolonged and minute and accumulated more 
material than I could use; which furnished me a good opportunity 
to see whether or not I had any imagination for the work of pict- 
uresque organization of material. The prose way of discoursing on 
those characters, would have been to start in at their birth, or earlier 
(among their ancestors) and after getting them born, travel right 
along down their lives chronologically, telling everything, little and 
great, thing after thing in'stupid faithfulness and garrulity like the 
chattering nurse in Rome, five minutes on a little quiet thing and 
five minutes on a great one, mechanically conscientious and equit- 
able—for is not a thing a thing, forever—that is the prose way, 1] 
say, of doing such discourses (and all discourses). But the way 
of Imagination is thus :—She selects from her superabundant mate- 
rial, as that painter did; and she puts to the front those things—a 
few—which show, and contain, the life, soul and essential spirit of the 
person to be portrayed, in his distinctive attributes. There are words, 
and there are deeds and passages, in every one’s life, whereinto are 
compressed his entire self; by them you know instantly his whole 
compass, his essential temper, his determinate rank in the creation ; 
and after that to search through the vast minutiz of his career is 
unnecessary :—or, if you do search, there is no need to take it all 
into your public discourse. Life is not long enough. The intellect 
and patience of human hearers are limited. You must stop speaking 
sometime ; and while you are speaking, you must make headway 
along your road; you must not pick every flower, and point out 
every view, and sit down on every green spot; you must rapidly 
gather the general bloom of things; and whereinsoever you intro- 
duce into your picture of the man in question, the secondary, and 





YALE LECTURES. 71 


little, in his career, you must do it by a touch; put those trifles in 
the yistas yonder, in the background. ‘That, I Seth: is the way of 
the imagination. 

And what I noticed in myself was this (to tell the whole story) : 
when I was not fagged and limp, I had the stamina to see that idol 
and strive for it, and partially reach it ; but when my brain had gone 
all and utterly into preliminary work, I inclined to tell all I knew, 
stringing it along in a dull, petty, chronological manner, which had 
in it the somnolency and endlessness of the flow of time. 

That is one illustration of unimaginative organization, and I 
might give many. It is unimaginative to have your sermon taper 
instead of cumulate, like the breaking away of waters, tremendous at 
first and feeble at last; or like a thunder-burst, magnificent, and 
followed by a long patter of ineffectual rain-drops. It is unimagi- 
native to swell one head of your discourse, to the injury of the 
others. An eye to proportion—an artistic eye, would avoid that. 
It is unimaginative to fall in love with the portico of your sermon, 
and elaborate it till, in the nature of things, the sermon itself 
cannot amount to much, comparatively. That is setting up a tall 
man along side of a little, to the injury of both. These unbalanced 
developments are caused, sometimes by redundant vigor and some- 
times by lack of vigor. A man full of fire, and full of matter, 
enjoys an unfenced range, like a swollen spring river, and inclines 
to take it. A man feeble, on the other hand, when he comes 
to sermonize, is like a feeble man carrying a burden; he stag- 
gers about, and the lines of grace and proportion he knows not. 
But in the case of men weak and of men strong, the more defi- 
nitely they have the idea of a rightly organized discourse, and the 
more they discipline themselves on that idea, the more will they 
come to move artwise ; until after not many years one may find it 
almost impossible to be otherwise than substantially artistic. The 
gondoliers in Venice, navigating forever along narrow canals 
bounded by the stone walls of the buildings, and compelled to shy 
those walls, will graze them to a hair, hundreds of times a day, and 
never strike ;.as though the prudence and skill of the boatman 
had at last passed into his craft, and given it the self-preserving in- 
stinct of a human soul; and it is one of our satisfactions that by 
dint of much effort, and much repetition, and that self-restraint 
which is one of the most difficult of lessons for powerful and ebullient 
minds, law-keeping and rigid art-work may become second nature. 


72 YALE LECTURES. 


I wish to repeat once more, that, although I use the word arta 
good deal in relation to sermons, I do not mean that sermons are 
to be made in devotion to art as the supreme enthusiasm of the 
preacher’s soul—surely he has grander inspirations than that ;—but 
sermons are to be fashioned into some shape, either good or bad_; 
and while a badly formed sermon may not wholly fail of good 
effect, yet the good effect is not the result of the bad form ever— 
but in spite of bad form rather; and always, other things being 
equal, the sermon artistically constructed most pleases God, and 
most powerfully reaches men. ‘That is the reason I am talkative on 
this subject and urgent. 

But let us pass now to the language of the pulpit, and to Imagi- 
nation as related to the use of language. 

It has been generally agreed that words, most of them, are 
physical things, in the sense that they were originally descriptive of 
physical phenomena. ‘They were descriptive of those phenomena, 
either as imitating the sound of them—for example, plash and 
dash mimic the noise of waters, and rush and buzz and whizz the 
noise of wings ;—or as being mysteriously fitted in some other way 
to express those phenomena. I cannot enter into the acute con- 
troversies of scholars at this point ;—as for instance, whether the 
great body of terms arc strictly imitative in their origin. It is 
enough for me that the specialists in this department incline to 
unanimity on the idea that, in one way or another, human language 
began in physicals, and in all subsequent use has smacked of 
the same. The first use of language, naturally, was to indicate 
things visible, tangible, and audible; the things of sense ; but by 
and by, as man developed into self-consciousness, and reflected on 
his own states of mind, it became necessary for him to devise terms 
descriptive of those states ;—and behold! then it was found that 
the physical terms before mentioned were suitable to that purpose. 
Somehow, they were. Somehow. And how? Some say, the words 
to voice the supersensible were arbitrarily chosen, just as mathema- 
ticians chose the letters of the alphabet to express the quantities 
which they manipulate, when there is not the least thing in those 
letters making them more fitted to the use in question, than forty 
other conceivable signs might be. But whether the truth or not, the 
most fascinating opinion seems to be that if the words which express 
physical phenomena are also convenient to describe immaterial phe- © 
nomena, and have actually been put to that use, it is because there 


YALE LECTURES. 73 


is some subtle, ordained similitude between those physicals and those 
immaterials ; something which makes them the best instruments to 
that end. Of course by long use words tend to lose their original, 
sensuous flavors, and the average man is likely to be confident that 
all words which have been applied to supersensible uses for ages, 
have. had the face-marks of their original, physical coinage entirely 
rubbed off, and are now insignificant and arbitrary terms, like thea, b, 
c, and y, z, of the algebraist. And the average man is right, to this 
extent :—that the mass of men use language without recognizing or 
caring to recognize, the primary import, and suggestion, of each 
term they speak. It is enough, they think, to say, reflect, without 
recollecting the fact that it means furn back, and distract without 
recollecting that it means pul/ apart, and prefer, without recollecting 
that it means-se¢ before. Why should we recollect these things 
(say they) :—what use is there in it, when the mental states indica- 
ted by reflect, distract, and prefer, are unmistakably pointed out, 
and fixed, without recollecting. 

In regard to this view, I put in two observations—and by those 
observations get to the point in this subject which I am concerned 
to reach. 

First. That words themselves seem to have an instinct of their 
origin, in that each word is inclined to refuse forever to be applied 
to any use in the vocabulary of the supersensible, which is contrary to, 
and destructive of, its primal and physical import. Reflect, for in- 
stance, meant turn back ;—well, reflect never can be brought to 
consent to being applied to a forward-reaching action of the mind ; 
it knows its own meaning if the average man does not, and it pro- 
poses to stand by its own first meaning, whether men care anything 
about it or not. There is that fine and curious persistency in words. 
They do not ask for any combinations of scholars to preserve them 
from perversion ; they preserve themselves. They are not afraid to 
be-used profusely by the unthinking and inexact multitude; they 
know that they rule their own destiny and can never be confused. 
That first. ' 

Secondly, it is the privilege of every man—and every preacher 
—to enter into this secret of primary significances, and, when he 
uses a word, to use it with a relish of its origin; a thorough-going 
test in many cases—a zest similar to his who handles antique manu- 
script, or an old missal, or a piece of armor worn by a world’s hero 
in some world-convulsing exigency; or any other thing that is 


74 | YALE LECTURES. 


wonderful and full of pathos by reason of its history. Words are not 
sounds but things, when you track them back to things. The signa- 
ture of the Duke of Wellington, was so many letters plus the Duke, 
and all terms of language are so many words plus things, solid things, 
concrete indestructible actualities. 

It may be questioned whether, in the swift run of utterance, 
especially of public utterance, any man is capable of tasting his own 
words in that way, and enjoying their ground flavors, and hearing 
their primeval undertone. But all men have some sense of the words 
they use, else they could not go on; and nobody would want them 
to goon. They may not sense the physical element therein, but 
they sense something in them. They do it with infinite rapidity. 
Even when they utter hundreds of words a minute, they are sprightly 
enough to catch up some honey from each term. And if they can 
catch some, they can catch more ;—in fact a practiced and schol- 
arly man can catch enough to keep him in a sort of intellectual in- 
toxication. I have listened to men in public discourse who have: 
sometimes jerked me from my sitting almost by some heavily-charged 
word, or some sudden compact and fiery sentence. Language 
spoken is not a flight of dull, wooden balls, but an outgoing of 
bells, sonorous meanings old and new, tones of time, tones faint and 
far-away sometimes, but distinct and good like the clear whistle of 
the boatswain in a hurricane. 

And, as I have implied, when a man uses language in that per- 
ceptive and pregnant way, all people who listen to him catch the 
contagion of his gusto. The most ignorant feel that something is 
going on; that the man is not showering forth X’s, Y’s, and Z’s, 
which, as simple letters, signify nothing, so that so far as effect 
is concerned he might as well vociferate inarticulately; but that 
there is a boom in all he says. 

Why is it that old sermons are such unusable ammunition, the 
abhorrence of the preacher and the soporific of the hearer. When 
first preached they were good enough ; first-rate, every one thought, 
perhaps. What has happened tothem? Nothing. There they are 
in their aboriginal grandeur. But something has happened to the 
preacher. When that discourse first came from him, he was in the 
full sense of its terms :—he finished it Saturday, and by Sunday 
the birth-warmth was not dead in it—he spoke what he knew, and 
what he knew as he went along ;—every common word was alive to - 
him, and he was alive init ; but since then time has slipped in, and 





YALE LECTURES. 75 


many events, and he has lost his connection with his words ; they 
were his at the time, he gathered them up from the general stock 
and mass of language and made them his, but now they have gone 
back into the general and public stock again and are not his, and 
therefore when he uses them he feels like a hypocrite—he is saying 
what he does not feel, dispensing words that he has not refilled. 
They are hollow, and sound hollow, and he wishes he was out of it. 
The only way to make an old sermon an honest thing and mag- 
netic again, is to pass it through a re-gestation ; let it enter a second 
time into its father’s womb and be born. 

And I have had a fancy that sermons delivered memoritor 
must be ever more in the curse of old ones, more or less. I never 
memorized a sermon, but I have memorized speeches—long ago— 
and when I spoke them, I always felt that I was shamming ; and to- 
day, when I listen to such an orator, I am seized with a painful feel- 
ing of unreality. I imagine I am, at any rate. I must not be too 
dogmatic about this, because eminent men, I believe, are advoca- 
ting the memoritor practice. Possibly, enough practice and some 
native facility takes a preacher at last beyond the unrealism of this 
business :—for it is unreal to be talking to your fellow men in the 
use of only one mental faculty, the memory—or in the use of that 
mainly. When you stand before a congregation you profess that 
you are there and that it is you who speak, whereas there is noth- 
ing there but your memory, I am supposing, (your memory and 
your body,) which is not you by nine-tenths, or more. 

But, as I said before, I must not make myself offensive to 
wiser men than myself. When they speak of their freedom, and joy 
and effectiveness in this kind of preaching, I love them, and 
believe what they say; but I am not convinced. — 

I spoke of using words in the delight of original relishes ; but 
I must add, as a part of my subject, that these root-relishes are not 
the only ones a preacher may have in his sermonizing. 

When a word has started and passed into use, it begins to have 
a history, and after many years it has gained a great history ;—it 
has had to do with great men and great events, and it has the same 
interest that an eminent personage has. Let William Gladstone 
land on our shores, or Victoria, or Alfred Tennyson, and it would 
not be the landing of so much flesh and blood, five to six feet high, 
weighing from one to two hundred pounds ; but it would be the land- 
ing of the Queen of England, the Poet Laureate of England, and the 

8 


76 | YALE LECTURES. 


Statesmanship of England ;—it would be the arrival of incarnate Eng- 
land, as you might say. In like manner, words have arrived in our 
century, all moss-grown, and festooned with associations, picked 
up in their long journeyings down from times of old; and it is so 
much added to a man’s pleasure in the use of them and so much 
added to the force of his exp~ession, if his mind detects, and savors, 
those precious additions. 

And another thing. Supposing I admit that all this thought of 
mine in regard to root-relishes and historical relishes (as I have 
called them) is visionary ; and that, however perceptive and imagi- 
native a man may be, he: simply cannot get back into those old 
contents of the words he uses. Grant it to be true that the greater 
part of human words, in the long attrition of use, have been rubbed 
down till their coinage is not visible, and they therefore are simply 
conventional signs, which could be just as well exchanged for nu- 
merical signs :—the particular mental act now called reflection being 
called 1, and the act called perception 2, and the act reverence 10; 
supposing that to be so. It is a highly afflictive supposition, but 
we will put up with it for a minute ortwo. Has imagination there- 
fore ceased to. be of great account to the writer and speaker, in his 
choice of language, and in his joy while he uses it? I tell you nay. 
For, as these empty conventional signs are employed to designate 
this and that,—as, reflection, perception, reverence, and the like, 
among things spiritual and physically imperceptible, and thou- 
sands of things likewise in the physical domain; it is of great im- 
portance that those numerous designated things should be lumi- 
nously and intensely seen, at the instant, by the man speaking and 
writing ; and it belongs to Imagination to do just that thorough and 
fervid seeing. If that seeing is not done, or in proportion as it is 
not done, words have no sense at all. I have already supposed that 
they have no historical and derivative meanings, and that they are 
like human beings without an ancestry or a creator; and now their 
only other possible significance is taken away from them. The 
preacher writes them down and delivers them to his people, as so many 
Zeros. He has no interest in them ;—for how can he have an in- 
terest in terms that came from nowhere, and are practically pointed 
at nothing. And as he has no interest in them, the interest of his 
hearers cannot amount to much, and I do not see why preaching 
should be any longer continued. No, no. If I say a word to mean 
something, I must distinctly see that intended thing—the more 


YALE LECTURES. 77 


distinctly the better—and that seeing, in so far as it is realistic, and 
emotional and picture-like, is the work of Imagination. 

While I am on this matter of language, with its coinage all 
effaced by centuries of use, permit me to refer you to old creeds and 
old liturgies as frequently examples ofthat thing. The creeds and the 
liturgies, in themselves, are well enough; but reiteration tends to 
dull a man’s sense of words ;—if he does not watch, and incessantly 
energize upon them, he loses not only their genetic meaning and 
vigor, and not only their historical meaning and vigor, as understood 
by the theologians and their generation who wrote them, but also 
their present meanings ; and, in this loss of all meanings, the reci- 
tation of these forms is as useless as an inarticulate monotone. 
Even that monotone might have some good influence in it, pro- 
vided it was solemn, and I should advise people to congregate on 
the Lord’s day and go through that, if nothing better could be had. 
The sound of the wind in pine forests is moral ;—all grave tones 
steadily prolonged are moral ; and liturgies will live and creeds will 
keep on, for the sake of the sound of them if for no other reason ;— 
but it must hurt their feelings dreadfully to be reduced to that, 
when they are conscious that they are live things; that they had a 
parentage and a powerful parentage, and have had a career, too; 
that they did mean something on the lips of those who made them, 
and were intended to describe forever certain august realities. 

I should like to spend about twenty-four hours of continuous 
speech here in your presence, running the terms of the Nicene 
Creed back to their radicals (so far as possible,) reproducing the 
history too of that great symbol, and especially its origination, and 
then when you and I had come into full possession of the dear old 
thing, standing up all together and reciting it. We should hardly 
be able to contain ourselves. The familiar drone of utterance 
would be changed to a play of thunderclaps, comparatively. We 
should have a Mt. Sinai here, and an awfulness as of God made 
visible and audible. 

We sometimes deplore the theological discussions that come 
up, and are afraid that the phraseologies of the fathers will get 
pounded into dust by the combatants, and we shall never have them 
any more ; but these contentions are one resounding way of notify- 
ing men that they must not any longer use their old phrases in an 
imitative and numb manner; that they must get themselves back 
into the sense of their creeds, the historical sense, and see whether 


78 YALE LECTURES. 


they are willing to subscribe to that sense wholly—if they are, it will 
be good for them to have been forced to do it afresh ; and really 
their creeds now will be the very breath of their life ; while if they find 
themselves not willing to subscribe, they are put into a wholesome 
live struggle to make something whereto they can subscribe, and can 
voice in assembled multitudes with a holy awe, and a holy jubilation. 

For one, I have ceased fearing that time-honored forms in the 
church, creedal and liturgic, will suffer permanent damage, in the 
vehemency and crush of debate. The Catholic symbols are the 
common-sense of the Christian ages, crystallized and solidified ; and 
they will bear a good deal of knocking about. They are the survi- 
vals of the fittest, and are therefore likely to survive. I do not know 
what verbal modifications may be forced upon them, nor how far 
their phrases may be refashioned ; but I certainly do not look to see 
any breachin their substance. And as to forms less hallowed, what- 
ever they are, forms provincial, forms denominational, forms philo- 
sophical, I am glad to see them put through the threshing mills of 
debate, at intervals, so that the immortal in them may redemon- 
strate its indestructibility, and the partial and ephemeral in them 
may be compelled to show its insufficiency. Not all insufficient 
things are worthless. The butterfly needs a worm-form by which 
to climb to its winged state; and Truth seems to be willing to put 
up with imperfect statements, by way of transition to something 
higher. She is a veritable butterfly, though, in heart and fact, 
whether detained as yet in her worm:life, or all emerged and fair. 

Another service which Imagination renders us in our sermon- 
izing, is her prolific contribution of images, and imageries, drawn 
from life and from Nature. 

It is thought, by some, to be dangerous to accept these contribu- 
tions and let them into our pulpit language. And it is dangerous, 
provided we are going to be so delighted with them as to use them 
for their own sake. If we abjure all esthetical dallyings, all dancing 
up and down in a twitter over our pretty things that we have thought 
of, our analogies, and decorations, and fanciful outflowerings ; if we 
just robustly turn all our devices of words in upon the ends of God, 
the benefit of men and the setting forth of his glory, then Imagina- 
tion is not merely innocent, but it is the very life of speech. And 
see what things she does. 

First, mark in what an omniverous and rich way she works up 
into utterance, all the familiar things of human life—even its homely 


YALE LECTURES. 79 


things ; though, to tell the truth, the moment she touches them they 
are no longer homely, but are transfigured in the light she sheds. 
Did you ever watch the workings of prose minds and observe how 
undaintily they handle the common, and are vulgarized by their con- 
tact with it. They bring it into the sanctuary sometimes, and it 
does not fit the holy place and is an offence. They cannot enter 
the common, without wallowing in it and drowning; whereas the 
imaginative mind is like the birds that cut the water, and even the 
puddle, with their swift wing and toss it up into the shine and 
sparkle of the sun. William Wordsworth undertook a good deal of 
that kind of work, (the working up of the common into noble ex- 
pression) and did not always succeed, some thought ; but, in larger 
part, he did succeed, and beautified life at many points. Robert 
Burns succeeded. ‘Thomas Carlyle succeeded pretty often. What 
pile was there in which that man would not grub, when his rage was 
on him ; but how rarely his grubbing soiled him, and how full his writ- 
ings are of the affairs that surged around him; full of the great and 
noble, full of the minute, and the lowly and the mean ; full of human — 
life as it literally went on in his day and land, whether in palace, or 
bog hut ; its tragedy, comedy, pathos and glee. 

This charging of rhetoric with the strong stock of daily and 
humble things, is often seen in uncultivated and even vulgar men, 
who are under no bondage of conventionalities and speak their minds 
with absolute veracity, and point-blank. Witness that western bor- 
der-man, described by Mark Twain, a man earnest and coarse, but 
affectionate, who sought the services of a minister just on from the 
East, well-dressed, civil-spoken, and proper, to attend the funeral of 
a prominent rough whom all the rude men believed in, and loved, 
and who must be spoken of in funeral speech with force and enthu- 
siasm. Read what he says and take in the vividness and reality of 
it. I rode with a New York omnibus driver once upon a day for 
some miles, on the top of his vehicle, and heard his opinion on 
many things; and noticed, first, that he had opinions sharply de- 
fined and reserved ; next, that he had no fear of mortals in showing 
them ; and finally, that he had a powerful vocabulary, part slang and 
part English ; but all of it bottomed on concrete, on stage-driving 
or other plain and ponderable realities. 

Sailors speak in the same way often, and hunters, and the mob, 
seasoning their talk with terms drawn from their own craft, and 
putting in sledge-hammer emphases, like the heavy strokes of their 


80 . YALE LECTURES. 


daily toil. Of course, nothing can redeem such talk as that about 
Buck Fanshaw’s funeral, and we must all keep wide away from the 
absolutely gross; but a refined man with poetic capacity—with 
Imagination, I mean—can touch and turn almost anything into 
gold—he can make the dirt blossom into a beauty that seems sky- 
born ;—and he does it in ways that are easy to his faculty; as, for 
example, where a thing is too gross for direct expression, and yet 
has value in it, he just alludes to it, in a far-away manner, in the use 
of some term that is itself high and fine, it being a curious fact that 
the purest and most cultured minds will receive a quite unmention- 
able thing, provided it is conveyed by indirection, and with a self- 
evident non-fellowship with its mere grossness. 

But life is full of things not gross, but only common, and lowly, 
and those we may easily use—and men most scholarly and fastidi- 
ous may take these up into their speech profusely, and had better. 
A man of horses and stables in my congregation, long ago, left 
the church after one of my sermons, saying :—‘“ Our Minister is 
pretty strong on the bit.”’ Now there was no harm in that. 
After an evening of uneasy and uncomfortable debate, wherein 
a certain Mr. Blank had been combative and unpleasant, a man said 
to me as we left :—‘‘ He had the hay on his horns to-night, sure 
enough.” Could anything be better than that, drawn from farm 
experiences? To say :—‘ Blank was combative,” would have been 
abstract and decorous; but Imagination brought in a contrary- 
minded and punching, horned creature, who punches for sheer 
punching’s sake, and just because she is overflowing with wicked- 
ness ; as is shown by the fact that she lunges into innocent and un- 
resisting haystacks. You see the animal with her head bestrown, 
and her look of general belligerency. It is pictorial. It is like 
Dr. John Brown’s description of the great dog Rab, whom he has 
made immortal in that sweetest, and realest, and deepest of sketches, 
“Rab and his Friends.” “He belonged to a lost tribe” (said 
the Doctor.) “He was brindled and grey like Rubislaw granite ; 
his hair short, hard, and close, like a lion’s ; his body thick-set like 
a little bull—a sort of compressed Hercules of adog. He must have 
been ninety pound weight, at the least ; he had a large blunt head ; 
his muzzle black as night, his mouth blacker than any night, a tooth 
or two being all he had, gleaming out of his jaws of darkness. His 


head was scarred with the records of old wounds, a sort of series of — 


fields of battle all over it. one eye out, one ear cropped as close as 





YALE LECTURES. 81 


was Archbishop Leighton’s father’s; the remaining eye had the 
power of two; and above it, and in constant communication with it, 
was a tattered rag of an ear, which was forever unfurling itself like 
an old flag; and then that bud of a tail, about one inch long, if it 
could in any sense be said to be long, being as broad as long ;— 
the mobility, the instantaneousness, of that bud, were very funny 
and surprising, and its expressive twinklings, and winkings, the inter- 
communications between the eye, the ear, and it, were of the oddest 
and swiftest. ‘Rab had the dignity and simplicity of great size ; 
and having fought his way all along the road to absolute supremacy, 
he was as mighty in his own line as Julius Cesar or the Duke of 
Wellington, and had the gravity of all great fighters.” Dr. Brown 
then goes on to compare Rab’s look with the look of the great 
Baptist preacher, Andrew Fuller, and declares them alike. That 
is what the Doctor said about Rab; and anybody who cannot see 
that pictured dog, ought to be bitten by him. 

I am speaking of Imagination dealing with lowly things, and 
making the lowly interesting and even noble, and I made this quo- 
tation under that head ; but I cannot help diverting long enough to 
point out the fine interfusion of that faculty through almost every 
word of that piece of writing. First of all, and before he began, the 
Doctor evidently with his mind’s eye saw his dog, in his total pre- 
sentment and rounded majesty and vigor. There he stood gnarly 
and real—all dog. There is a sort of genius in that. Then notice 
his word-work. He compares the dog’s color to that of Rubislaw 
granite, but in that comparison, after the true manner and instinct 
of Imagination, he secures more than color ; he gives a foreshadowing 
of the dog’s massiveness and solidity. Rubislaw granite, said he. 
Next, he compares his hair to a lion’s hair, and in that he secures hair 
for Raband a leonine element. A distinct imaginative advance in the 
description. Another man would have said :—“ his hair was short, 
hard, and close,” but Brown added :—“ like a lion’s.”” Then :—“ his 
body, was thick set, like a bull, a sort of compressed Hercules of a 
dog.” Mark those vigorous concretes, bull, and Hercules—and that 
splendid adjective, compressed. If he had simply said Hercules, he 
would have done a strong thing, and touched Rab off with a sort 
of dignity ; but when he added, compressed Hercules, he got his 
description down to the dimensions of a dog and at the same time 
dropped out not a single penny-weight of the Herculean strength, 
but only condensed it and made it more awful. Then his mouth, 


82 YALE LECTURES. 


a midnight abyss and mystery, made more dark by two white teeth 
-in it. And his head mapped with battle-fields, (his fighting 
character still amplified upon, you see, that is, kept, in the foreground 
in the midst of all comparisons, and by them) ;—his ear close cut 
off (more fight)—like the father of Archbishop Leighton (a humor- 
ous and affectionate assimilation of dog life, and human life, wherein 
the man, (the bishop’s father) lost nothing and the dog got a 
love-lift. Then: “the other eye had the power of two ’”’—how har- 
monious that is with all we have already been made to know of 
Rab :—it is an addition to the picture, but it is an addition con- 
gtuous with granite, lion, little bull, compressed Hercules, and 
scarred head—a tremendous eye. And his one remaining ear was 
torn, and tattered, and flag-like, but fearfully vital, and moving yet : 
(more fight, and more energy and compressed Hercules.) And 
his little tail was vital and moving, and knowing—it twinkled and 
winked just as anybody might, and it interchanged cute winks with 
that wide-awake ear—the realism of the thing is enough to make a 
dog laugh—the personalization of those small members is so com- 
plete that you cannot take your eyes from them, you would almost 
be willing to be a dog yourself, to have so much sense in your 
humble members. No mere man ever did. And then lest Rab 
might seem to be nothing but a fighter and so be vulgarized, the imag- 
inative and deep-hearted Doctor informs us that he was dignified, 
grave, and simple, and looked like the Rev. Dr. Andrew Fuller. It 
would have been prosaic to say that Rab had some mental qualities 
like men. Ofcourse, he had. All dogs have. That is a fact in 
nature—a bald, common fact. But Imagination loves to get in her 
bald, common facts, and make people see them, in a way of her 
own, in a way so that they shall see them and take to them, and be 
thoroughly pleased, melted and won over. So in this case, having 
given us a plain painting of Rab’s face—a strong face, but not 
really pious—she breathes a mild transfiguration over it and leads 
you to embrace it, in a burst of laughter, by mentioning the dis- 
tinguished and excellent Dr. Fuller, the great and mighty Baptist 
Rab. 

In all this, my Friends, you note the distinctive marks of that 
faculty on which I have now said so much :—its vigorous and visional 
perception, its creative combinations, its heart and heartiness, so — 
that it can be warm and fond overa dog and can drag Julius Czesars 
and eminent men of divinity into dog-likeness, and not belittle the 


YALE LECTURES. 83 


men either—true imagination would never do that ; and its capacity 
to put itself in his place, whether the place be Rab’s, as in this case, 
or Dr. Chalmers’, or dear little Marjorie Fleming’s, as in other essays 
of this same John Brown—than whom no better compacted, or moré 
divinely-tender and true man was ever brought forth of the great 
Brown stock, I venture to say. 

I have really now no time left in which to speak as I ought of 
the images, and imageries, and numerous enrichments, which Imagi- 
nation can bring into the diction of the pulpit, out of endless Nature. 
We preachers have just as much right to Nature as poets have. To 
be sure, when we go to her, we go on serious business, and we are 
after grave material therefore, and poets had better go in about the 
same way—all the great ones do ;—moreover, Nature is grave, any- 
way ; her most festive shows do not start a man into any frivolity or 
thin giggle. Nature is never jocose. She makes us laugh some- 
times, but it is in some sort as the melodious thunders laugh, not 
in jollity, but in the soberness of a great joy. 

And what can we get from Nature? Well, read the Poets and 
see. We can get her repose; and a really restless diction is not pos- 
sible to him who is in habitual communion with her. He insensibly 
gathers up into his speech the spirit of her tranquilty. Also, we get 
rhetorical truthfulness and reality. I have praised Imagination a 
good deal, but an imagination that does not live in Nature, and in 
real life, and start all her flights from that solid ground is a phan- 
tasmal and moony creature, an inadmissible wild one in the pulpit, 
in poetry, in art, and in all human expression. 

We have seen that it is the instinct of the Imagination to make 
original combinations, as in landscape painting ; but those original 
combinations must be strictly conformable to Nature, in all respects. 
They must be made up of natural material, of actual trees, flowers, 
seas, green fields, hills, skies, showers, and commotions—and they 
must organize those actualities as Nature herself is wont to organize 
them ; otherwise the picture is an insane thing. Well, how shall we 
get. this truthfulness, but by much companionship with Nature. In 
‘other words, we get naturalness from Nature. And an Imagination 
that conserves its naturalness by an habitual stand in Nature, is sure 
of itself, and sure to do realistic and acceptable work, when called 
(as the Imagination often is,) to move out into the supernatural, 
and picture things over there. A man not thoroughly naturalized 
in Nature is utterly flighty and ridiculous out there. A writer 


84 YALE LECTURES. 


introduces some supernatural character into his drama, I will suppose. 
Well, that supernatural personage must be made to speak, and be- 
have himself, something different from a man, for in that way only 
can it be shown that he is not a man, but a superior being ; never- 
theless he must be made to act naturally after all—that is, in the 
general manner of human nature, else all human readers will spew 
him out. Imagination projecting herself into the unheard-of, and 
spinning stories of that land, must keep her two feet down solid, 
all the while, on the heard-of and familiar, and in that way keep up 
some sort of congruity between those two lands. And all imagina- 
tive rhetoric—in the pulpit or elsewhere—must perpetually rationalize 
itself and make itself valid and acceptable to good taste ; to Nature 
in Nature, and to Nature or the natural, in human life as well. 

I repeat, we can get from Nature truthfulness and reality in 
our pulpit expression. 

And again, we may diversify and beautify our expression, and 
make it pithy and rich from the same source. The forms and 
activities of Nature are a vast language prepared to our hand, and it 
is as legitimate to express ourselves—all the realities of our souls and 
all the realities of our total life on earth—through her forms, as it is 
to studiously keep away from her, and use only conventional terms 
out of which the Nature element has evaporated at last, so that they 
are supposed to have a dry and colorless precision. I am not argu- 
ing on the question of their superior precision, otherwise I might 
deny it, but what I am particularly after, at this present, is the 
variety, and beauty, and vividness, and celestial pith of the natur- 
alistic diction. Dr. Brown called Rab a bull, a lion, a Hercules, a 
mass of granite of a certain color, a series of old battle-fields, as far 
as his head was concerned ; a Julius Cesar and a Dr. Fuller—and 
several more things. He might have said—Rab—and stopped. 
But that would not have been much to us who never saw Rab. He 
might have said lion, or bull, and stopped. Or he might have 
named the Duke of Wellington and Julius Cesar, and stopped, But 
I would not have had him omit Andrew Fuller for anything. What 
would Rab have been, without Fuller added. Don’t you see, 
Dr. Brown knew the value of natural comparisons, and what hun- 
dreds of them there are, and what endless modifications may be put 
upon a dog by using them freely? So in that case where Hamlet | 
addressed the skull of Yorick. First he said he had ridden on Yo- 
rick’s back a thousand times. (That is a good many more than he 


YALE LECTURES. 85 


ever did ride—but Imagination may speak with liberty and she 
never seems to be lying:) in fact it was truer to say a thousand, 
than to tell exactly how many times he did ride. Next, Hamlet 
said :—“ Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft.” 
Next :—“ where be your gibes now? Yourgambols? Your songs? 
Your flashes of merriment that were wont to set the table on a roar.” 
Hamlet, in this instance, drew his particulars from human life and 
not from Nature, but how every added touch increased the visibility 
of Yorick to our eyes and made him to us an interesting human 
thing. 

I plead for this versatility and profuseness in ministers. Turn 
all creation into your diction. Thomas Carlyle ended his life of 
Oliver Cromwell by calling England an ostrich, with its “ head stuck 
into the readiest bush of old church-tippets, king-cloaks, or what 
other sheltering fallacy there may be, and so awaits the issue.” He 
closes his life of Robert Burns, with this eulogy, and tender simili- 
tude: “While the Shakespeares and Miltons roll on like mighty 
rivers through the country of thought, bearing fleets of traffickers 
and assiduous pearl-fishers on their waves, this little Valclusa foun- 
tain will also arrest our eye ; for this also is of Nature’s own, and 
most cunning, workmanship, and bursts from the depths of the earth 
with a full-gushing current into the light of day ; and often will the 
traveler turn aside to drink of its clear waters, and muse among its 
rocks and pines.” His life of Richter he ends with this natural 
touch :——“‘In the moral desert of vulgar Literature, with its sandy 
wastes, and parched, bitter, and too often poisonous shrubs, the 
writings of this man will rise in their irregular luxuriance like a 
cluster of date-trees, with its green sward and well of water, to refresh 
the pilgrim, in the sultry solitude, with nourishment and shade.” 
He puts in this comparison in the last sentence of his life of 
Heine—referring to Heine’s victorious struggle against adverse 
circumstances :—“ It is but the artichoke that will not grow except 
in gardens. The acorn is cast carelessly abroad into the wilderness, 
yet it rises to be an oak}; on the wild soil it nourishes itself, it 
defies the tempest, and lives for a thousand years.’’ In the last 
sentence of his life of Schiller, he speaks of him as likely to be “a 
towering land-mark in the solitude of the past, when distance shall 
have dwarfed into invisibility many lesser people that once encom- 
passed him, and hid him from the near beholder.”” Near the close 
of his life of Walter Scott, he speaks of the pecuniary adversities of 


86 YALE LECTURES. 


Scott’s latter years and of the manful, strong and fatal drudging which 
he did to redeem himself, and says of him :—“ The noble war-horse 
that once laughed at the shaking of the spear, how is he doomed to 
toil himself dead, dragging ignoble wheels.”’ And in the final sentence 
of his sketch of Baillie the covenanter, he calls him—‘“a rather 
opulent, but very confused, quarry, out of which some edifice might 
in part be built.”” An ostrich with its head hidden in church tippets 
and soon. A Valclusa fountain. A cluster of date-trees in an oasis. 
An artichoke as contrasted with an acorn. An ever-visible great 
landmark in the great past. A proud war-horse condemned to wheels. 
A rich confused quarry, out of which something might be built. 

I select these at random, of course there are a thousand more— 
and they illustrate a rhetorical habit—a naturalistic habit—a sensu- 
ous and metaphorical habit—that is particularly good for preachers. 
It is legitimate. It is going straight to the original store-house of 
language. It is resorting to a vocabulary that can never stale. It 
is speaking to people in a manner they can understand. It makes 
the things supersensible and metaphysical stand out, and cease to 
be abstract and remote. _ It weds Religion to Poetry, and Poetry 
to Religion, where they belong. It is imitation of the Bible—an 
oriental, image-freighted, and picturesque book—which has done 
wonders for man as revealing a salvation for him, but has done a 
good deal also to keep alive in the cold, reflective, precise and 
abstract Western intellect, the flush and luxuriance and many-sided 
metaphorizing, of the fresh youth of the human race. 

In this multifarious play of analogies, it is possible to overload | 
your utterance and give your hearers a feeling that their minister 
was originally designed for a kaleidoscope, and mostly enjoys being 
that, rather than the bearer of a plain and unconfused message from 
God to perishing sinners ; but it is easy to avoid that ;—the Bible 
avoids it—thousands of luxuriant rhetoricians avoid it—and they 
avoid it in the same way that you must :—namely, by having a high 
practical end to the which they are pushing with every ounce of their 
strength. St. Paul tumbles along like a spring freshet sometimes, 
and his language cannot be parsed by any known rules ;—but he 
does not pile up any confusion, because the objective to which he 
drives pulls him on mightily, and pulls him clear out of all word- 
mongering and all thought of it. As well could Jesus climbing Cal- 
vary take pride in his own gait, as this his consecrated Apostle, work 
up an over-elaborate and showy diction, full of confused glories. 


YALE LECTURES. 87 


Alfred Tennyson does not lack in these natural imageries of 
which I am speaking, but he is as simple and easy to understand as 
a piece of Ionic Sculpture. I opened his book of lamentation over 
Arthur Hallam the other day, and thought I would show you how 
this most opulent of word-masters keeps himself within the lines of 
absolute simplicity and perspicuity; but I find I have no time 
for that. See the excellent Imagination of John Henry Newman, 
but how chastened, orderly, and limpid his utterance is. Jeremy 
Taylor is not so self-restrained. And I have felt that our Dr. 
Bushnell would have helped the world to understand him faster if 
he had not set an image in his almost every word like the face and 
flash of a diamond. Of course, this is the peril of affluence, even 
as overflows are the peril of well-watered lands; but dear me! let 
us have waters anyhow. We will damthem. We will hew channels 
for them. And we had rather be drowned in them, than to dry up 
and die in the sand-wastes of a diction absolutely and forever arid. 


SHORT SERMONS. 


If I say, as I now do, that I am going to fill this present hour 
with some remarks on short sermons, I judge that it will seem a 
rather minute subject to some of you. But I hope to make it sizable 
gradually, by intertangling it with numbers of things roundabout ; 
for all things are great if only their relations are opened ;—and 
then none of the congregations to whom we are sent with our 
preaching, have any notion that short sermons is a small title, I 
fancy ;—the most inferior man that listens to us has his mind all made 
upon the long sermon business,—he may be confused in theology, 
but on that he is clear. And he is so numerous in these days. that 
we preachers are forced to give some sort of heed to what he says ; 
especially as all the superior people are in with him and think just as 
he does. 

A short sermon is a sermon that'seems short ; it may be fifteen 
minutes long or it may be an hour. ‘Time has nothing to do with it. 
If a man is unconscious no speech seems long to him. The hearer 
fast asleep is willing you should go on till you are tired out. And, 
what is the same thing, the hearer so absorbed by what you are say- 
ing as to be unconscious, does not charge the sermon with being 
prolix. ‘Time is measured, not by clocks, nor even by the rotation 
of the earth, but by the state of our minds, and the things going on 
therein. All experience proves that. Absolute mental vacuity has 
no time-measure, neither has mental concentration much. 

But, I pass from these scattering remarks, to the sad work of 
drawing out.a list of the things that make sermons seem long :— 
things in the minister, I mean. To be sure, there are some things 


outside of the minister that will do it. Bishop Potter, of New York, | 


went to dedicate a very fine church ;—and after the service, when 
the people were gathered about in a bubble of happification over 





VALE LECTURES. 89 


the goodly edifice now completed and sanctified, it was noticed that 
he was silent. And when some one at last ventured to inquire : ‘‘ Do 
you not like our Church,” he said :—“O yes, it is a grand estab- 
lishment,—and has only three faults.” Of course they wanted to 
know right off, what those were. ‘You can neither see, nor hear, 
nor breathe in it,” said the Bishop. As good a description of a 
first-class, modern, gothic meeting-house, as was ever given perhaps 
—so far as it goes. 

Well, sermons are apt to be long inside of such structures. 
The preacher’s face is full of holy emotion, but nobody can see it. 
The preacher’s sermon is full of the best sort of material, and is 
solidly phrased, and charged with edification ;—-so that one would 
naturally say: ‘the more of such a sermon the better.” But the 
people do not say that who sit in those parts where the speaker’s 
voice rolls around in reverberations and half of his articulations 
are lost. The preacher is wide awake, demonstrative and impressive, 
but not to those who are sensitive to bad air, and are semi-comatose 
on account of it. My church in Hartford is a little inclined to 
some of these weaknesses, and I have always felt that my people do 
not know what a preacher I am. When I take my natural swing I 
preach about forty to forty-five minutes; but a sermon of that 
number of pages in that edifice takes an hour, because I cannot 
speak with any rapidity where each word is going to be reduplicated, 
and rolled around, and take five minutes perhaps in getting down 
from among the fascinating arches into people’s ears, well lodged and 
articulate. 

I could tell you a great deal about such things, from experience 
and from hearsay,—the miserable external things that diminish our 
pulpit power, and make us tedious ;—however, my purpose does not 
lie in that direction, but rather in the direction of our faults, whereby 
our sermonizing has a look of too much length. 

A montonous voice makes length, enormously. There is noth- 
ing that gives such a sense of eternity as a well continued sober 
monotone. Always at the sea-shore, I think of that. Always, too, 
in pine forests. The hum of a distant factory will do it, if only 
the hum has depth and solemnity. I stood among the graves around 
Melrose Abbey and heard the Abbey clock strike off the hours ; 
and ruminated on the old-time, and all-time sound of those pro- 
longed bell-strokes. They were mellow enough, and not unalluring 
to the esthetic ear; but I forgot all about esthetics, and all about 


90 YALE LECTURES. 


the graves that encircled me, some of them interesting enough ; 
and all about the dismantled and pensive Abbey, and everything 
else on earth or in heaven, and just considered that unvarying bell, 
and the resound of time in it. | 

So a sermon :—it may be esthetic, there may be supreme 
melodies in it, it may be architectural, Abbey-like or whatever, and 
festooned with luxuriant church ivies ;—a perfect love of a sermon ; 
but if, through it all, there drones on a pulpit voice, impressive 
but eternal,—it must be that all men will say :—“is not that a little 
long,—would not our minister, good man, be more edifying if he 
knew when to stop.” Well, he did stop. He was only half an 
hour, but they had a feeling, all through, that he had had them in 
hand twice that time. 

Now, Brethren, there are some things continually operating on 
preachers to make them monotonous in the voice ;—some things 
particularly hard to resist. Our themes require a solemn voice in 
the main ;—and we speak on holy days, and in a holy place, and 
after preparatory holy exercises in our closets,—we are in the pres- 
ence of God, and we must cause the people to feel that they are ;— 
and a voice dramatic, a voice colloquial, a voice humorous, a voice very 
various anyway, seems utterly ruled out in the nature of the case. 

Some twenty years ago, one Communion Sabbath in my church, 
my wife, not being strong, thought she would not arrive till the 
close of my discourse. But she arrived some minutes before the 
close, and there in the porch she listened to my goings on. She 
could not hear the words, but she heard the voice, and noticed the | 
voice all the more because that was all she could hear. And I was 
much surprised, and much grieved, to have her say that I moved 
that morning in a perfectly measured and wearisome cadence ;— 
the thing I hated, and always had. It showed me that our kind of 
work will cadence, and measure off, and make tiresome almost any- 
body—if he does not look out. 

But how shall he look out. First, let the theological seminaries 
put their fledgelings into the hands of an elocutionist, a knowing, 
determined, immitigable man, who will not take no for an answer ; 
and thus let some incipient good habit be worked up ; a glimmering 
possibility, (if not probability), that the young men will begin right 
in their ministry. 

And when they have begun, let them cultivate a theology, and 
a general way of looking at things, that permits some flexibility and 





YALE LECTURES. 91 


human warmth of voice. Methodists never preach monotonously. 
They believe in some terrible things, just as we do ;—no man can 
look out among the facts of the creation and honestly deny forty 
terrible things ;—but they believe in forty gracious things and 
lovely, super-eminent over all terribles ; and believe in them in such | 
heartiness and constancy that it keeps their feeling in a shout ;— 
their sermons shout ;—they weep, but they shout ;—they preach 
Perdition with a gospel underflow of hallelujah. I heard them all 
my youth, and left them in my youth, but I believe they are more 
right than we are (many of us) in this thing. Christianity is not a 
Jeremiad—not exactly. It premises Jeremiads, and a sad state of 
things indescribable, but those Jeremiads it proposes to drown and 
it is in the world for that one purpose ;—and we, her messengers, 
ought not to voice her in a manner contrary to her genius. If we 
let into our voices the monotone of the sea (as I suppose we must 
a little sometimes), let the “ floods clap their hands” also therein, 
and let an occasional land-sound slip in, and land-smell, as flowers, 
mown grass and the breath of the dewy night ; the creation is not 
all pitched on one key. The God of dooms is the God of beauty 
and delight, too—if there be Hells, and Hell-glooms, as there every- 
where are, there be also Paradisaical radiancies and cries of joy ;— 
and in so far as a preacher is in the love of God, continually show- 
ered forth on created things, it will modulate his utterance—it will 
break the flow of his monotony—his voice, always sufficiently 
serious, will-range the’entire scale of normal voices ; until perchance 
‘by much use and the advance of age, his vocal chords are unelastic 
and unresponsive to the versatility of his mind. Then he must 
look what he can’t speak—and by that time his face will have be- 
come facile to such uses and able to serve him a good turn. 
Another way to make a sermon seem long, is analagous to the 
first one ;—namely,—make your thought monotonous, and your 
delivery. In my address on Imagination in Ministers, I mentioned 
that, for substance, and I will refer to it again only amoment. The 
thought and the delivery of a sermon may be monotonously excellent, 
as easily as monotonously worthless. It is monotony in either case, 
and has in it all the well-known effects of this killing quality. I por- 
trayed, you may remember, a monotonous man whom I knew— 
whose sermonizing had no light and shade, no perspective, no power 
of the picturesque, but worked ona flat and was all foreground. Hu- 
man nature cannot endure that. I would bring humor into the 
9 


92 YALE LECTURES. 


pulpit in careful measures before I would permit it. I would let in 
dialogue and great vivacity of gestures. I would diversify my 
themes extremely. I would make one sermon a story; and one a 
portraiture, and one a criticism, and one a conversation, and one a 
dream, and one a poem even, (if I could write poetry). Doubtless 
we do not want to lower preaching from its divine nobleness ; but 
pokiness lowers it pretty effectually ;—or if it cannot be said literally 
to lower it, it does make it of no account, so that the question of 
high or low ceases to be of much interest. 

Again, a device for making short sermons long is, to have but 
slow progress through your subject. I look back to my early work, 
and I find several things, by which, unwittingly, I slowed myself 
and made those sermons undeliverable in all after years. I had one 
habit like this :—after putting forth a statement and expressing an 
idea, I proceeded directly to state that thing, with some slight 
meaning added, or in some minute new aspect; I was mincing, 
and microscopic; I did not make a long, free stride and get 
on—I do not know but my father helped me into that. He 
was a preacher himself, and he often declared to me that the average 
hearer is slow, and needs to be nursed along into a thought by a 
large reiteration of it in changed form ;—not the bag-pipe exactly 
(I don’t think he meant that), but the bag-pipe with two or three 
small-voiced attachments. Moreover, I had been under the teach- 
ing and under the example of Dr. Nathaniel Taylor, and sympa- 
thetically too, who was a sharp reasoner and metaphysician, and 
advanced by short steps well taken, after the manner of metaphysi- 
cians ;—a good thing when you are proving a point and do not 
intend to have your process of argument broken at any link by the 
onset of all other metaphysicians combined. But congregations 
do not like that ;—they like a bold brush—never mind your small 
touches—strike out your idea in mass, and go along. 

Another slowness discovered by me in those first discourses 
was a habit of showing forth all the steps by which I arrived at my 
conclusion ; as though your physician, whom you had called, should 
spend an hour telling you just how he reached your house, whether 
on foot, wheels, or the back of a horse, and by what path, or cross- 
lot cut-off. What you want is he and his medicine. And what the 
people want in ministers, is their conclusions mostly, and not the 
laborious rationalizing by which they stepped along to them. There 
is too much of-that preaching. It is a good mental exercise to 





YALE LECTURES. 93 


those who will bear it, but the nineteenth century is an impatient 
time, and if you have anything to say, wants you to say it and let 
explanations go. A third way by which I spun out, was in proving 
things. Proving them. They did not need to be proved very likely, 
but I wanted to prove them. ‘“ O, we admit it, we admit it all,” 
the people were ready to say; ‘‘ but why do you admit it,” thought 
I. “Iam afraid you do not know the reason of the hope you hold, 
and I am going to tell you.” And inasmuch as it frequently is the 
case that accepted beliefs lie in the soul the most non-germinant 
and useless things conceivable, because they have been accepted 
traditionally and conventionally, and not as having been searched 
out ; who shall say that I did not do some good by my arguings on 
the truisms of Religion. On the other hand, who shall deny that 
an outright affirmation simply, froma man who knows what he says, 
is not generally as illuminating and as quickening to blind and dor- 
mant believers, as the logicking that we practice on them at such 
length. 

Again, long introductions was a form of tediousness with me. 
And then many preachers call their hearers to chew the cud of their 
sermons over again, in extended applications at the end ;—too ex- 
tended, because too repetitious of what has gone before. A subject 
well wrought out is already applied, and if the minister squares 
around to the work of formal applications, he must give a distinct 
impression in them of substantial addition to what has already been 
said. The boy who was whipped by his pious mother, and then 
exhorted, begged that the exhortations might be left off. He felt 
that the subject had been sufficiently applied in the whipping, and 
exhortations were tedious and unedifying. 

Another form of tediousness in sermons is lack of substance. 
An unsubstantial discourse is always long. Some men are unsub- 
stantial because they have too much facility of thought, and too 
much facility, especially, of expression. If you have the gift to work 
up a small-sized thought—an atom of a thing—into a voluminous 
rhetoric, you are dreadfully tempted to do it. The days are short 
with ministers,—the working hours in each day,—and their labors 
are many, and sermons must come along at the rate of several a 
week, (old or new, or both), and heavy work is not congenial to the 
unsanctified parts of the ministerial heart, so, if one fair-sized 
thought can be spread over four Sundays, by force of words, the 
man feels as the prophet did when he had miraculously expanded 


94 YALE ‘LECTURES. 


the widow’s oil. It is a brilliant thing to expand ideas ;—and if you 
can do it with a suitablé detonation, as when gunpowder suddenly 
springs into gas and increases its volume from a kernel the size of a 
pin-head, to fill the whole werld—why ! how can you withstand the 
temptation. Probably you will not. And so, after a while, your 
people will be looking around to find what makes your wonderful 
sermons, half an hour long only, feel as though they had been 
holding forth a week. 

Extemporaneous preachers are quite exposed to thinness. But 
that would lead me into a long and delicate discussion, and I dread it. 

The only way to make substantial sermons is to work. Of 
course you have genius, but you must work. You are to bea settled 
minister I suppose ;—how settled, time will tell ;—but I can give my 
word for it now, that if you stay any, anywhere, you must work. 
And you must work by right methods. Only right methods are 
fruitful methods. Operate your intellect according to the laws of 
intellect and it will teem forever. For example, work excursively, 
and you run thin at last. Work incursively ; that is being inter- 
preted, penetratively, analytically, in the long-bore fashion, and you 
will find the artesian reservoirs of the creation, and all congrega- 
tions will rejoice in you. And I want to add, the penetrative habit 
is as possible for small brains as for large ones. I do not mean that 
small brains can do all that large ones can; but they can do all that 
they can; while if they do not get into the artesian secret they will 
never do half in their power. 

If you speak with a slow utterance, you will make yourself long ; 
—long by the church clock, but longer yet in the feeling of your 
audience. When I was younger than I am now I did not think so 
much of this, but having been pricked on it myself in these latter 
years, since I commenced to accommodate my speaking to a high- 
class gothic interior, I am sensible of the importance of the subject. 
The force that slows your articulation may be gothic, or it may be 
approaching age, or it may be an extra solemnity on your part, or an 
intense appreciation-of what you are saying, so that you want to take 
time to hold on to each word until each word has passed into your 
mind its whole benediction. As to that last, I find that I am caught 
in it most when I am reading tne Scriptures in the public service. 
I am in some deep chapter of St. John, say; and I know that 
I am travelling over bottomless beds of ore. I do not know it 
simply as having been told that there are great beds there, I myself 


YALE LECTURES. 95 


see the gleams of them, and I cannot bear to just run along. So I 
pause, and I pause, and when I do move I scarcely move, and the 
people out before me in their pews who are less perceptive than I at 
the moment, see no sense in my delaying and wish I would go on. 
Well, on the whole, I had better go on. If I alone were involved in 
the reading, I would take all necessary time, even as’in steam-travel 
through beautiful countries I would like to slacken the train to ten 
miles an hour, or less ; but in Bible readings and sermon preachings, 
as in trains, there are hundreds of others on board—some who care 
little for beauty, some who cannot possibly sit more than about so 
long, some who cannot concentrate their minds more than a few 
minutes. Many classes indeed, together with some children, ‘to 
whom we ought to accommodate ourselves a little, it may be. 

As to slowness caused. by solemnity, I have noticed that often 
on ceremonial occasions. I remember administrations of the 
Lord’s Supper where several clergymen took part ;—special occa- 
sions they were, so that ordinance was impressive beyond the 
common ;—and all those officiators took on, and were loaded by, 
that exceptional impressiveness, and they abated their natural speed 
accordingly, (real speed being unsolemn, essentially) ; but when they 
all did that, and every man of them got on slower than I ever saw him 
before ; and when moreover, every one of them, in my judgment, 
struck a gait so deliberate that all show of vigor was lost out of it, 
and the occasion seemed more likely to be languid than affirmative 
and heart-filling, I sunk away into wearisomeness. And, I fancy, 
that our congregations (the congregations of some of us) are 
habitually afflicted in the same way. Sermons are solemn things, 
and ordinances are solemn, and worship is solemn, and it is asolemn 
thing to live at all, but we must not be so oppressed by it as to be 
dumb, and when we do speak we must not drag eee a certain 
natural and seemly briskness. 

I am reminded here of that to-and-fro of Scripture reading 
petween the minister and the people which has come into many of 
our unliturgical congregations. I believe in it, and have in it my 
own church, where it is carried on heartily and unanimously; but 
I have noticed that the greater part of the congregations that prac- 
tice it, are so slow in the delivery of the words that they feeble the 
whole thing. They cannot keep step together well at such a pace, 
and they lose the inspiration of concord and a solid march; and 
the blessed Scriptures themselves seem to tame down from their 


96 YALE: LECTURES. 


native force under such a languid handling. Perhaps the liturgical 
churches incline to the other extreme. I have felt so when I found 
myself unable to take breath often enough to keep up with them, 
but then the breathing of a Congregational Minister is peculiar to 
himself, and ought not perhaps to be enforced on all Christendom. 
That to which we are habituated is easy for us, and seems rational. 
And it is curious to notice how little strange and open to criticism, 
a service different from our own seems, when we have been in it for 
a while and have caught its rhythm. 

My next specification as to sermons made long by various 
devices, is, that if your whole thought in preaching is to unfold your 
subject, without any special aim at any person or thing in the con- 
gregation before you, a chasm is opened between you and them, 
and they look at you across that chasm, as a spectacle principally ; 
an interesting one, perhaps, but not half so interesting as you would 
be if you eyed them with a determined intention; your eye roam- 
ing from pew to pew, and from face to face, so that each listener, 
soon or later, is likely to feel himself addressed and individually 
pressed upon in a sort of. thou-art-the-man urgency. If you look 
long and intently into the face of a person asleep, it will wake him, 
it is said, and many preachers have an eye-power that makes a man 
feel as though the Judgment Day had come when they light on him ; 
and I have heard ministers say that they could actually stir up a 
man asleep, and clean gone away, by focusing their discourse on 
him ;—not in any personalties, of course, but in a stress of inten- 
tion. These ministers have no more magnetism and galvanic thrill 
than you or I, but they avail themselves of the oratorieal privilege 
of taking aim, by voice and by eye, and silent, imperious volition. 
When I began to preach I did not know this ;—and for years I did not 
know it ;—and at times I even prided myself on the fact, (for it 
was a fact), that I could speak to a small assembly as enthusiasti- 
cally as I could to a larger one, because I drew my inspiration from 
my subject and not from men,—and I got myself into a miserable 
habit of not seeing the faces into which I was speaking; so that a 
person might sit ten feet in front of me a year without my knowing 
he was there, or whether he was a man, awomanorachild. Now, 
that is a great loss ;—a loss to me, and a loss to my hearer ;—he 
might almost as well have a phonograph speaking to him. When 
croakers say that preaching is dying out, and that the printing press 
is going to take its place, we are accustomed to reply; “‘ preaching 


YALE LECTURES. 97 


never can die out, because it has in it what the printed page never 
did, or can have ;—namely, the personal element, man dealing 
with man, soul on soul, in a divine inter-wrestling, and forty-fold 
mutuality,” but if the preacher sees nobody, and is after nobody in 
particular, nor even after the congregation at large, that. boasted 
personal element is gone and preaching may be ousted from its 
function at last. 

I have confessed my own sins pretty freely, but of course you 
will not understand me to say that I take no aim. Ido; but A, 
B and C would certainly feel, each one, the shock of me more, if 
he more felt the seizure of my individualizing eye, and the occa- 
sional jerk of my will grappled on him ;—instead of being compelled 
to content himself with the general roar of my subject only. It 
may be a sublime roar, but it tends to make my speech seem 
longer than it is. 

Close along side of this is the failure we make, when our 
themes, and our way of handling them, and our diction, are far away 
from the customary thinking and the daily life of the mass. Put a 
young man to school from his youth, let college have him four 
years, and the professional curriculum as many, and then let him go 
out to address human beings ; and what can be expected of him at 
first, but more or less separateness from the people ;—who, nine 
tenths of them, have had no full education, but have had the drill 
of concrete labor, and the powerful school-mastering of joy and 
sorrow ;—sorrows deep as the grave, and joys high as heaven. Ex- 
actly how much good does it do, to take a whole Sunday morning 
demonstrating to such, the freedom of the will, or the precise sub- 
jective contents of a man going through this and that important 
experience P—especially if you use a metaphysical and scholastic 
terminology, or a theologic terminology brought down from some 
eminently respectable but remote antiquity. A year ago, I delivered a 
discourse against the naturalistic school of thinkers, on a certain point ; 
and I wished to turn on them one of their own guns ;—the doctrine 
namely, of the relativity of knowledge. So I defined that doctrine 
—and defined it well; I have looked back since to see ; well, I say ; 
that is, with absolute clearness and terms that had color in them, 
they not being blanched in the round and round of long metaphys- 
ical use. I was much pleased with the definition. After church 
I met one of the brightest women in my assembly, who had been 
really edified she said, and intellectually stirred up by what I had 


98 YALE: LECTURES. 


preached ; and I ventured to see where that definition had hit her. 
“T listened to that (said she) with all my might, but when you had 
finished, I felt the wish that you would begin and go right over it 
again.” So she was hit, and I had a victory in that she now wanted to 
know what the relativity of knowledge is, (she never did before) ; 
but for the present, she was just dazed. I am not quite prepared 
to say I am sorry I went into that business of defining ; it seems too 
bad to think of that labor as lost ;—still, it may answer to illustrate, 
in a general and inexact manner, the way we educated, philosophi- 
cal and bookish preachers have (and we all tend to be so) 
of climbing up on to our seven-storied topics, and from that awful 
height raining down our grandiloquent rhetoric on the parched 
ground beneath ;—the parched ground looks up in a reverential and 
stunned way, and sometimes feels as though it were being really wet 
down, and then again does not know whether it be so or not, like that 
confused and wondering woman whom I named. 
A sermon let fall from that height and in that disguise seems long. 
_And I know no way to avoid such, and get close to men, but 
by going among men a great deal, and learning to love them man 
by man, as the redeemed of God committed to your care, and on 
their way to the eventualities eternal, along a path burdensome and 
full of ambushes. When a preacher comes to feel that his subjects 
in the pulpit are the select packages of a divine dispensary, pro- 
vided for the sick and sorrowful, and the weak, he will be the most 
practical of mortals, and church-going in his congregation, will 
seem to mean business every Sunday. I was greatly instructed by 
a speech I delivered once to a full assembly of sailors in the city of 
New York. It was the anniversary of their temperance society, and 
I was the orator of the occasion. I wrote what I had to say, but 
kept the manuscript in my pocket. And I humbly judged that I 
had adjusted myself to the occasion,—to a good degree. They 
listened to me in entire silence and with perfect respect. 1 presume 
they were impressed. But when I closed, the presiding minister, 
who knew what he was about, called up a thick-set sailor-man for a 
ten minutes talk; and then they were impressed beyond bounds, 
and beyond all the proprieties of silence. I felt my superiority 
even yet, in respect of brains, and culture, and the power to write 
a good-looking manuscript ; so that I did not propose to exchange 
with him and be he, but I would like to know for all time the 
straight cut to men’s minds, hearts and wills. 


YALE LECTURES. 99 


I think we may count on the blessed Spirit of God to assist us 
in this, provided we open ourselves to him, and never consent to go 
into our sermoning and our preaching without seeking him. 
Preathing is not lecturing, but is differenced from that by several 
marks, and by none more distinctly than by this: that if it is indeed 
preaching, in preaching’s full idea, it is speaking in the impulse and 
the light of the Holy Ghost. I do not think that sermons of the 
Holy Ghost are likely to seem long ; partly because their topics are 
divinely given to us, partly because our style in them is divinely 
chastened and brought near to the people whom we are inwardly 
moved to try to bless ; partly because nothing makes the mind of 
the preacher fruitful, versatile and unmonotonous, like the Holy 
Ghost, so that we can stand the strain of years and years, minister- 
ing to the same congregation without tiring them; and partly 
because, when that Spirit of God has done all these things for the 
preacher, he is sure to go into the minds of the people also, to make 
them interested and receptive. I gave a sermon on Effectual 
Prayer, which certain clerical men declared to me was the best 
argument on that subject they ever heard. Well now, there was no 
argument in it. It was just a statement of my opinions, and it was 
written on Saturday morning and in the play of my customary 
intellect merely. But I never in my life was more authentically 
moved from on high than in that sermon, and my opinions were 
mine as given-to me, and I spoke by authority; I and my sermon 
were instruments of the Holy Spirit ; and I knew that we were, at 
the time, and what those people called a great argument was a 
- common-place argument made great by Euan atin interfusions in 
both them and it. 

Every minister has these experiences. And he needs them. 
Why ! if you are but a lecturer in the pulpit you are in competition 
with first-class strong men who spend a life-time perfecting them- 
selves in some speciality, and then consume a month (perhaps 
months) in preparing a single lecture. And then, there are printed 
essays, and monographs, and elaborate, powerful volumes which 
discuss all conceivable subjects ; and the people who listen to you 
read them ; and your lecturing they insensibly gauge by those high 
standards with which they are so familiar; and there, O man, you 
are, condemned to speak at least twice a week, in an intellectual 
race with these athletes. I tell you, you cannot do it. Your 
genius may be great, and your industry gigantic, but you cannot do 


100 YALE’ LECTURES. 


it. You must come into the secret of small discourses made mighty 
by the mighty God in them. 

And made reasonably short, too. For, while God the Spirit in 
a man makes him to be fertile of thoughts, and gloriously commu- 
nicative, so that you might naturally say :—‘“ He will speak for- 
hours,”—behold ! he does not. That same Spirit that starts him, 
stops him ;—precisely as in Nature—in the whole circuit of living 
things—God observes bounds ;—a tree is only so high ; you can see 
the top of it—there is vitality enough in it to push up a mile, 
but it rounds out its idea and stops; and an animal is so long; 
and a summer is so many months, and no more ;—and it lies in the 
very idea of a living organism that it is definitely circumscribed, 
and not boundless. And a sermon God-given and God-wrought 
is an organism and has sensible limits. In fact, | imagine that a 
whole course of lectures, which should discuss every feature of good 
sermons, might be made by simply unfolding that one idea—The 
Sermon a living Organism. 

I will spend the few moments that now remain in giving three 
rules for shortening sermons. Virtually, I have been giving rules all 
along, but I have three more. 

And first. One way to make a short sermon is to stop. ‘That 
is a second-grade, and mechanical way, though—and I do not think 
much of it. Live things ought to stop, for the good and respectable 
reason that they have reached their term; and they ought not to 
stop before that. If they do, it is a case of stunting. However, if 
your sermon cannot be stopped in any other way, you must stunt it. 
Strike it by lightning. Put a worm to the root of it. Any way to 
get it stopped. If itis asermon that has been carpentered together 
a mechanical way of stopping is as good as any other. 

But, secondly, a good way to get brevity is to choose just one 
thought, and resolve that when you have opened that one, in a fair 
practical statement of it, you will pull up. Do not take one of 
those vast and infinitely plural thoughts, like the love of God, but 
a little one—a very little one, because, the minute you begin to look 
at it, it will swell. Years ago, I read that at the Massachusetts Ag- 
ricultural College in Amherst, they had put an iron harness on a 
squash and hitched it to a certain mechanism by which they could 
tell how much the squash would lift by the expansive force of its 
growth—and it lifted several thousand pounds. It was bound to 
grow. So an idea, diligently considered, tends to grow and cannot 


YALE LECTURES. 101 


be repressed. You plant it in a pint pot and think that is enough, 
but it is not. So you must be careful to get a thought little enough, 
else you will have a sermon too enormous for anything. Or if you 
take one of the vast thoughts, take only one aspect of it, and work 
that. Aim at twenty to twenty-five minutes ;—and then, all the first 
minutes, push on through your material rapidly—use it up fast—so 
that when you come to the last half of your discourse you may be 
sure of spinning out to your goal, in somewhere near your predeter- 
‘mined time. Most of the half hour sermons I ever wrote were started 
for about twenty minutes, and grew the other ten minutes by the irre- 
sistible dilation of life. I fashioned them for the time mentioned, 
by selecting an apparent mustard-seed of a topic, and then, when 
it began to get big, throwing out half the things I might say on it. 
This leads me to my last rule—or word of caution. Do not 
think you must put in to your sermon everything that belongs to the 
theme you are on, and all you can think of ;—nor even all the im- 
portant things. You will speak again on that subject some day. 
You are a settled minister probably—which, in this nineteenth cen- 
tury, is a sarcastical term, meaning a few years. But you will stay a few 
years. And some day you will come up to that theme from a dif- 
ferent direction, and then you will work in the material that you 
discarded on that first occasion. I often keep my redundant mem- 
oranda against such a day as that. Consider too, that your people 
have no sense of loss when you incorporate in your discourse only a 
part of the ore you had dug out. You have a large and full-toned 
conception of what your sermon ought to be, because you have care- 
fully looked into the topic, and discovered the magnitude and multi- 
tude of its points ; but the only conception of the topic which your 
congregation have, is that which you give them in that sermon which 
seems to you so disemboweled, for brevity’s sake. It is not disem- 
boweled, to them. No one has any sense of loss when he does not 
know that he has lost anything. I have missed hundreds of things 
in life which I might have had, and it was necessary to the ideal 
fullness of my life that they should come into it; but my life seems 
now about as full as I can stand, and, not having heard generally 
what those things are which have escaped me, I do not pine. 
Neither do your listeners pine, O preacher, for anything you left 
out—not ordinarily. We torment ourselves too much at this point. 
Consider also that a genuine sermon, though it be but twenty 
minutes long, has in it all the essential juices of the subject which it 


102 YALE LECTURES. 


expounds. Tap one sugar maple, and you have the entire secret of 
maple sap. You do not need to drink the whole grove dry, nor 
even the one tree. 

The truly divine subjects that belong in sermons, do all curi- 
ously cohere, one with another, and are nourished by the same essen- 
tial circulation. Let a real preacher preach on election, and his 
people will have a cup from the Gospel spring. Let him preach on 
Hell, and they will taste the same waters. And if that is so, much 
more plainly is it true that any one theme, fragmentarily stated, 
because there is not time to state it entirely, will have the authentic 
taste of the whole great theme. I continually increase in my sense 
of the sufficiency of brief statements in the pulpit, so that they be 
direct, swift-moving, out of the warm interiors of the subject in 
hand, and not from its outskirts; and, further, contagious with the 
personal energy of a man who is in his subject, and has his subject 
in him, by good study of it, by the Holy Ghost, and by an experi- 
ence which makes him absolutely know what he is talking about. 

_ Iam speaking, you will understand, of the preaching which we 
are called to give our people, Sunday by Sunday, and year by year. 
Sometimes we are called: to open matters to the bottom sands, and 
from shore to shore, as where St. Paul preached all night, or where 
Jesus prolonged his last passover utterance till the moon, the dear 
Paschal moon, was far on in the sky, and the night well spent. 
When the occasion demands it, or even when our own divine irre- 
pressibility demands it, we will not fear a long pull; some may not 
be willing to listen (one man fell asleep when Paul preached that — 
time), but others some will listen, as being able to see the move- 
ment of God in us, and the glory of his message through us. 

Gentlemen, to-day for the first time, I have spoken to you less 
than an hour, and I am-therefore a beautiful illustration of my own 
subject. 





Deh a A RT SELON aU 
FAITHFULNESS. 


I wish I might give to the young men present something of my 
own sense of the importance to them, to the churches of which they 
may be pastors, to the denomination in which they may stand, and to 
the general cause of Christ, that they each one attend, faithfully and 
cordially, the rather numerous convocations, conferences, associa- 
tions, consociations, ministers’ meetings, councils, and general coun- 
cils, to which they will find themselves related, as they pass on in 
their ministry. Time was when I should have been a very unsuita- 
ble lecturer to you on this subject, because I did not appreciate 
these extra-parishional obligations and privileges, and sinned against 
them with a high hand and an outstretched arm—doing it deliber- 
ately, and because my ideas about such things were wrong. But, 
now, I do so plainly see that they were wrong, and have been so 
ashamed of them for a good while, that I consider myself to have 
great qualifications for speaking to you, and exhorting you, and giv- 
ing you a right trend, here at the start of your clerical career. 

Now why did I, when I started, eschew these wholesome 
assemblies? If I say, I did it because I was a fool, that would be 
the truth, but not the whole truth. I was shy. I dreaded to meet 
men and exchange opinions with them. Shy,I say. Shy about 
everything in fact. When Dr. Fitch resigned the pastorate of Yale 
College, and the next Alumni meeting was considering that notable 
event, I heard one of the speakers say :—‘ It was once asked how in 
the world a man so scandalously timid as the doctor, ever raised cour- 
age to accept such a position as that; and the reply was, because 
he was too timid to reject it.” Well, I understood that remark. 


104 . YALE LECTURES. 


And, young gentlemen, perhaps I had better drop in a parenthesis 
here, and tell you, out of my own experience, that the fear of man 
can be considerably outgrown by ministers. What you are compelled 
to do, you can do—and keep doing, and gradually men and assem- 
blies are not so clothed with terrors as they used to be—that is, 
provided you have a sufficiently obstinate will, and also a physique 
that does not miserably give way under you when you lay a strain 
on it. The legs of a certain marshal of Napoleon the Great, 
always trembled’ on the edge of battle in the most unedifying manner, 
we are told; but he never paid any attention to them, he said. 
“He gave them their own sweet way, and while they trembled he 
fought.”’ Not all legs of men will stand such treatment as that, but 
most will, if they are edged along and humored a little. A friend 
and relative of mine, facing his first considerable assembly, became 
blind and felt his neck shortening down to his shoulders, and had 
to be led off and never became an orator; but ministers are not 
out before assemblies on business of their own, they being divine 
ambassadors; and that sense of mission would keep the tiniest 
boat, head on to any gale. Moreover, it is a curious fact that often 
a soul, constitutionally timorous in the presence of the private man, 
loses all that when those private persons are massed before him a 
thousand strong to be addressed. The speaker seems to pass out 
then into the grandeur of impersonal considerations, and in the 
enthusiasm of them he is sublimed and fear has no hold on him. 

Thus much on ministerial courage, my young and apprehen- 
sive brothers. | 

I abjured convocations for fear’s sake, I was saying. Also I 
abjured clerical bodies, because I did not rightly esteem ministers. 
I had somehow picked up that precious piece of misunderstanding 
and practical slander, which has latterly had some special ventila- 
tion in the public prints; the notion that preachers, as a class, do 
not frankly speak their minds on the great matters of doctrine and 
religion, but put themselves before the public as more all-believing 
persons than they really are; declaring, oftimes, what they are 
expected to declare, or think they ought to declare, rather than 
exactly what they are able to see and rest in, and live for, and stake 
their eternity on. 

Well, beloved, I have come out of that, and I wish you would 
take my word for it, that ministers are no such second-class and ~ 
time-serving men of God as such talk implies. My discovery in 





YALE LECTURES. 105 


regard to them is, that while they are earthern vessels, and had bet- 
ter be—so long as they are ministers—even as the Eternal Son of 
God, when he would serve men, took on himself their nature, and 
many of its infirmities—nevertheless those earthen vessels are not 
so earthern as to be good for nothing; but are of the better sort, 
decidedly. They are honest. They are frank—just as frank as 
honesty requires. They are magnanimous. They are brotherly— 
with each other, and with all men. They are truth-seekers and 
lovers. They are intelligent and candid. They are clean in their 
lives. They are gentlemanly. They are conversational and agreea- 
ble. They show well in emergencies, and are able to be martyrs. 
They are well-informed. They are fitted for the leaderships of all 
sorts to which they are called. I will not be choked down. by any 
modesty in this matter. Neither in this lecture will I be choked, 
nor in conventions of lawyers, or physicians, or merchants, or 
women, or anybody else ;—we have no need to fear any of them, 
and, my brother, if ever you fall to thinking of your own demerits, 
and your own insignificance, and get so shame-faced that you are 
tempted to make a slack testimony for your order before a wicked 
and gainsaying world, do you impute to yourself the merits of the 
better members of the order, long enough to deliver a rousing tes- 
timony. For the men in question deserve it,—visibly they do; 
and then, if they be looked into historically—that is, along all the 
nobler lines of history, it will be found that society and govern- 
ment, and all- welfares, have been as much indebted to them as to 
any one. 

After this preliminary skirmish of mine, you are prepared, I 
hope, to go on with me, while I draw out in form, some of the rea- 
sons why you should be very duty-full towards church and clerical 
assemblies. You will notice that I speak as a Congregational min- 
ister, considerably, as I reasonably may before a body of men, the 
most of whom are likely to serve in the Congregational field. The 
principles, however, which I lay down, apply equally well to all 
Christian communions. 

First, then, observe; if Congregationalism—as distinguished 
from Independency—is to exist, it must be by denominational con- 
vocations ; these are the forms and the means of corporate life and, 
if they are kept up, somebody must keep them up; and if some- 
body must, why not you, A, B, and C? It is as much your business 
as itis mine. On the question whether Congregationalism ought to 


106 YALE LECTURES. 


exist, I will not argue. Independency is impracticable, in regard 
of the great ends of Christian propagandism:; and, in the last analy- 
sis, it is contrary to the Christian Spirit. When I was remarking on 
my own aversion to convictions originally, I forgot to say, that I had 
nursed myself along into the solitariness and repellancy of Indi- 
vidualism. I thought a man’s religion and his religious opinions 
were a matter between himself and his God, and did not admit of 
intermeddlers. I even declined church membership for a time, 
being afraid that the clear lines of my own personality might get 
confused, and I suffer some mergence in other people if I joined 
myself to anything. You will detect the kernel of truth in my posi- 
tion ; a man must maintain himself an unmistakable integer ; cohe- 
rence and cohesion, and the agglutinous instinct may be carried 
clear to the point of self-loss ;—and local churches may agglutinate 
inordinately, and bring up in an impersonal corporeity, national, 
provincial or other; and yet Individualism, pure and simple, is 
indefensible abstractly, and when it is brought to the proof of 
experiment, it shows itself the quintessence and first principle of 
disorganization and anarchy. 

We must get together. then, in many kinds of assemblies. 
There must be councils, conferences, associations, synods, general 
conventions, and the like. ‘These various congresses have duties to 
perform, that are indispensable to the general life. Duties to per- 
form. Young men who surmise that they are right for ministers, 
must be inspected unto the uttermost. Churches which surmise 
that they have hit on a right minister for themselves, must be 
advised ;—sometimes that they have, and sometimes that they have 
not ; and sometimes that they both have and have not. Disorder- 
liness must be advised. Heterodoxy must be labored with and 
voted on. Great questions of morals must have a more than indi- 
vidual yea or nay pronounced on them. Ecclesiastical precedents 
must be made. Many things must be thrown into the mill of a 
national handling, in general assemblies, in order that what is wide- 
afloat in single minds may get formulated in a formulation of size 
enough to be visible and ponderous ;—it is astonishing to what a 
ripeness the general mind may come by the separate and scattered 
gestations of large numbers of private minds ; and yet have no con- 
sciousness of it until some general body meets and makes a deliver- 
ance. It is like an orchard which is red-ripe, all through, but needs 
a good general wind to shake it down and make all beholders see 


YALE LECTURES. 107 


that the day of completeness has come. By these means Individ- 
ualism is Christianized into Catholicism, self-consciousness into con- 
sciousness corporate, localism into universalism, bush-fighting into 
regiments, brigades, and divisions, preaching alone, into a conscious 
voicing of the whole church of God, creed-saying, a ripple here and 
a splash there, into the sound of many waters, and the august em- 
phasis of all generations. 

Go to the councils then, anu the meetings, and the regular con- 
ventions, and whatever else may be provided for you to take a hand 
in. Councils get joked in these days as self-conceited and pom- 
pous. futilities, but these jokers know not what they say. It does 
expand a man’s self-consciousness to be a councilman, and he may 
even go so far as pomposity in certain cases ; but as to these bodies 
being futilities, that is not so. In the Roman communion, certainly, 
they are not; and even in a communion so intensely individualis- 
tic as the Congregational, councils are yet capable of making a 
good deal of trouble, for those that deserve it, and much good for 
those who deserve that ;—as you will find if you go to all you are 
ever called to. Go to them, I say, once more. Do your duty ;— 
your denominational duty, and your inter-denominational duty,— 
and your international duty, if you should ever get appointed 
Christ’s delegate to other lands. And your own people must let 
you spread out onthese. They will be wanting a council themselves 
some day.. And ifthe principle of shirking gets shed abroad among 
ministers, how will councils and the rest be made up? 

My second reason for faithfulness to your corporate obligations, 
is, that if you decline them, and just converge yourself upon your 
parish work, and there stick year after year, it narrows you, both your 
views, and your feelings. It may’make you conceited as to “ your 
parish,” “‘ your congregation,” “ your people,” “ your pulpit,’ “ and 
your Sunday school,” or it may, on the other hand, weaken your 
hopefulness and your courage, and slacken the energy of your 
stroke. I judge that this localization of one’s self, works in the 
direction of conceit as often as any way, I thought of that while 
conversing with a Protestant Episcopal clergyman, ali worn out 
because he did not dare leave his pulpit for a moment (he said) 
lest some ministerial brother coming in there might, in a single 
sermon, wipe out his months of careful labor on a class which he was 
preparing for confirmation. Perhaps your first impulse on hearing 


such talk as that is to admire the man’s devotion. Certainly 
IO 


108 YALE LECTURES. 


that confirmation class was well followed up, and I presume they 
were nourished on substantial truths ;—but one’s second thought 
is, that they were followed and nourished by a man so intensely 
specialized as to have lost his breadth, and his bigness ;—and 
always in teaching, the teacher is quite as much as his doctrine. 
He was not so important to that class as he thought. ‘Thousands of 
clergymen could have handled them as well as he. He was so 
much of a parish minister that he was nothing else. He had so few 
outings that he misestimated his ministerial brethren. He did not 
know the kind of sermons they were preaching. He mismeasured 
the importance of that class of his. It was very important, but 
there are such classes without number all over the world ; and there 
are other congregations, all about, and while the particular must not 
be undervalued, the general is surely more than the particular ;— 
and no man can make any just judgment on anything, unless he is 
conversant with generals. Moreover, while a home-staying, and 
home-laboring minister, runs a risk of being thus made small and 
full of a puffy estimate of his own services, his congregation, on 
their part, may suffer in the same way. If their minister circulated 
widely, in the various assemblies of his denomination, and of other 
denominations, he would bring in wafts from those outlying regions ; 
bits of information, movements of sympathy, intelligent judgments 
of his own, founded on this wide survey of his ;—and by all this, 
that particular people, while remaining sensible of themselves, would 
be made sensible of the rest of the creation ; would like to hear 
other ministers, and would run the risk of ruining a confirmation 
class; would consider that a religious service was not spoiled if 
their minister was absent for once ; and, speaking generally, would 
get a valid gauge on their-own selves and their own labors, and 
affairs. But their minister declines to circulate, does not feel the 
need of a wide contact with Christendom through its many charac- 
teristic assemblies, thinks it takes too much time to attend to these 
things, and that his local duties are all he can carry ;—so, while he 
is circumscribed and belittled, and at the same time is dilated in 
self-importance, they run into the same infirmities. 

I want to speak a word concerning the enheartenment which 
one may get by an extended familiarity with Zion at large. One 
Monday morning in 1872, I boarded a train bound from London to 
Liverpool to take ship for home, and I found myself facing an old 
man, who proved to be a clergyman andan American. Were you in 


YALE LECTURES. 109 


London, yesterday? said I.. Yes. And where did you attend 
church? At Mr. Spurgeon’s. Did you hear that sermon of his in 
the morning, from the text: ‘ He is a root out of a dry ground.” 
Yes. And what did you think of it? Thereupon he was so filled 
with emotion that he could not reply. But his wife took it up, and 
said :—We cried all the way through it. And why did you cry? 
said I. Then it came out, at last, that he had been a missionary in 
Turkey all his life, and to come up now, as he had within a few 
days, out of Turkish surroundings, and all the depressions thereof, 
where there is not one Christian to a hundred square miles, and get 
into that immense assembly with its immense unity in the Holy 
Ghost, and hear them singing in a great swing like the final hallelu- 
jahs of the redeemed ; and then to hear that truly wonderful dis- 
course (and I think it was wonderful, and I shall never lose the 
sound of it), in which, point after point, it was shown wherein 
Christ was a root out of dry ground, but was also shown how this 
unpromising One had made his victories, and was on his way to a 
kingdom that shall fill the whole earth,—why ! it was more than 
the old man’s heart could endure ;—he overflowed—he took the 
occasion up imaginatively, after the manner of high feeling always, 
and made it signify and seem the ultimate unity of man in the 
blessed Jesus, according to that grand sentence of St. Paul in his 
Epistle to the Ephesians, the first chapter, and the sixteenth verse : 
“That in the dispensation of the fulness of times, he might gather 
together in one all things in Christ, both which are in heaven, and 
which are on earth, even in Him.” In the seership of that sen- 
tence, the man sat and wept, while the great service went on. And 
I myself have often felt a similar enlargement and a similar joy. 
Even under circumstances so disadvantageous as a high service in 
St. Peter’s at Rome, I have been able to rise into a sort of Millen- 
ial feeling. The mighty multitude, made up of all lands and all 
nationalities, and all ranks, under the whole heaven ; the jubilate of 
choirs reduplicated through the echoing great spaces of the cathe- 
dral, and even the spectacular elements of the occasion, were woven 
together into a vision, I found, of Christianity universalized and tri- 
umphant, fulfilling what I read afterwards on the base-stone of the 
Egyptian obelisk that had been set up in the great square in front 
of the church, and surmounted by a cross, namely :—“‘ Behold the 
cross of the Lord—lo! the Lion of the tribe of Judah has con- 
quered.” ‘Tugging forever in my own parish, looking out forever 


110 YALE LECTURES. 


on my one comparatively little congregation, and seeing only such 
minute results of labor as are possible to a single man on a single 
spot, my sense of the majesty of Christianity, and its dominion, 
prospectively as well as to-day, may slip away from me a little ; but 
when I walk about Zion and survey her towers and catch the 
uplift and hosannah of her masses, multitudes, and millions, I am 
restored to the largeness that belongs to me. I have comprehen- 
sion and vision. I have insight and foresight and sight all around. 

It is not every day we can get into these ecumenical and vast 
meetings, and have our idea of what Christendom is, and what 
Christianity means thus suddenly enlarged, and made transporting ; 
but yau can accomplish something of the same sort by slow degrees, 
in frequenting many kinds of lesser meetings: In a gathering of 
the ministers of a city, on Monday morning, with an inter-mixture 
of Baptists, Congregationalists, Methodists, and about everything 
you can think of, each one ready to make an argument for his spe- 
cial Ism, and all ready, also, to flow into the one grand current of 
undenominational thought, the occasion works beautifully to pull 
you out of localism, and out of all your special rages, and make 
you a sizable and round-a-bout man. I attended a May meeting of 
the Quakers in New York, years ago, and came away with a 
renewed sense of several things whereof my own parish might not 
have reminded me in forty years. I attended every session of a 
Methodist annual conference that met in my city once, and had 
restored to me considerably the days of my youth, when I was 
familiar with the Methodistic stride, and did not know but I was 
myself foreordained to that movement all the days of my life. It 
is good to take another man’s gait sometimes. It advises you that 
several gaits are possible, and several legitimate, and that there are 
several, of which one is substantially as good as the other. A friend 
of mine with me in Europe, accompanied me to the service of a 
certain eccentric communion (as he would call it), and some things 
done by them seemed very amusing and ridiculous to him. Well, 
they were not amusing and they were not ridiculous. He was 
stiff-jointed by a life-long tread-milling in Congregationalism, and 
was not equal to the versatile movements of that truly beautiful and 
very plausible ritual. 

It does a man good even to exchange pulpits, once in a while. 
He sees how Israel looks in all kinds of costumes. He manifolds 
his conception of church edifices, and choirs and liturgies. He 


YALE LECTURES. 111 


learns how possible itis to preach in unprecedented pulpits. He 
comes home a limberer and a wiser man, and walks into his work 
again with a certain catholicity. 

Great contact with Christians in your own body, and Chris- 
tians at large, is a rich re-enforcement of your doctrinal feeling also. 
The divisions of Christendom are numerous, but the concords of 
Christendom are more. I do not know that they are more numeri- 
cally, and I do not care. You cannot measure things by count. 
Lilliput counts one, Czesar counts one and one only. The true meas- 
ures are moral, and the unanimity of the Christian world on the 
great momenta of faith, utterly drowns out all discords, if only you 
have an ear to hear. Standing on a rocky sea coast, the shatter of 
the waves might fully fill your ear; but how light is mere shattering 
compared to that one grave, and immense ocean-tone which eter- 
nally fills the whole sky. Thus open your ear to the tone of the 
ages, as with unvarying unanimity they speak forth the great facts 
and formulations of our faith, and all Jesser sounds are silenced, and 
you feel yourself re-established in the mighty main things. And 
the way to get your ear open is to attend assemblies. I have often 
felt, in the general meetings of the Christian body to which I 
belong, that I wanted the assembled brethren to stand up every time 
in some grand creed-saying, in which they could all agree ; some 
creed, too, in which the general church always has agreed, so that 
voices absent might be added to voices present, and the innumer- 
able departed might strike in with the living—what an edification 
it would be! how we should be doctrinalized afresh! for we are 
creatures of sense, and what is spoken seems authenticated by being 
spoken, especially if, in the speaking, all redeemed voices combine. 

Again, be sure to frequent all legitimate meetings, for nu- 
merous little reasons, such as the following: It is something, to 
put your eyes on the men of celebrity, and the good men, whom 
you are likely to meet there. It is a fine thing for young men to 
have heroes—and for old ones, too—theological heroes—heroes of 
reform—men of great and admirable learning—men of noble 
eloquence—men of great endowments of magnetism. The advance 
of years tends to lessen one’s heroes, I suppose ;—some heroes 
it quite obliterates, and others it reduces; and some sad and 
disagreeable old men confess that they have no admirations 
left—poor old creatures! I say to you, there is no need of 
these wholesale disenchantments. I am old enough to know, 


112 YALE LECTURES. 


and I say it. I do not know how many men there are whom 
I would go thousands of miles to see and hear, and feel the touch of 
their vigor. I see their limitations, but I see also where they round 
out towards the infinite. They represent to me the better forms of 
strength, and the better forms of virtue ;—they represent to me, in 
short, those great abstract truths, principles, and virtues, which are 
the enthusiasm of life ; and they represent them in that way which 
is most impressive to all men; namely, as personalized, and lived 
out. So, Jesus could say :—‘‘I am the Truth and the Life ;” and 
His victory lay in His incarnation of these great things. And some 
other men, in their measure, and with a difference, can say the 
same thing. And we like to look at those men; it is a miserable 
day for us when we do not like to. My memory is full of such 
meetings, and it always gladdens me and strengthens me to recall 
them. 

Moreover, let me say to you, privately, it may be much practi- 
cal advantage to you some day to know, and be known, by these 
men and brethren whom you meet—say, in the assemblies of your 
own denomination. Young men have their difficulties, in which 
they need assistance and protection. They have entanglements in 
their parishes, controversies and contentions against which they 
cannot make head, self-sufficient and uninspired deacons (though 
I am obliged to say that deacons are a maligned class—they aver- 
age excellently well) ; but sometimes a monstrous one will spring up, 
and then a young minister needs some old, bulky, herculean brother- 
minister in whom to hide himself. Yes, often, the beginners need 
help in their parishes. 

Or they come into perturbations and uncertainties of thought. 
Or they go so far as to adopt opinions which they suppose to be 
inharmonious with the current doctrine of their sect; and then 
they grow self-conscious and unhappy. The more peculiar they 
seem to themselves, the more disinclined are they to move about 
freely among their brethren, and you never see them in the general 
assemblies. They are afraid. They feel themselves black sheep, 
and they have the touchiness of all black sheep. If any one makes 
a shy at them they do not think it is humor, but a dig at their pecu- 
liarities. And there is no telling into what retirement and misery 
and explosiveness they may go at last. Probably it will occur to 
them that they must leave their denomination, and see if they can- 
not find better adjustments somewhere else ;—and they even wish 


YALE LECTURES. 113 


they were out of the pulpit, for good and all. JI have more than once 
seen men of this sort. And more often still, I have noticed young 
men who were putting forth the first symptoms of this unhappy state. 
Well, the remedy for this—if it has not already passed beyond 
remedy—one remedy at any rate, and as good as any other, 
is to mingle much in the assemblies, and rub against other men— 
and to take counsel of the principal men, perhaps privately, or more 
likely in public discussions, where they may be heard expressing 
themselves. As likely as not you will find that you are not the 
utterly eccentric person you had supposed. Other men have. 
thoughts as well as you, and they know the wrench of doubt, and - 
the daze of a man when he does not see how the conclusions 
whereat he has arrived can be harmonized with the standards. 
These matured and broad-shouldered men whom I am recom- 
mending to you in your predicaments, have succeeded in extract- 
ing from life several precious bits of wisdom. ‘They have learned 
how to manage a parish, so that now it would be a very monstrous 
deacon that could unhorse them. They have learned how to 
cherish numerous views of their own, without inflicting them on 
their people, or on their denomination ; or striving to make them 
agree with the standards or the standards with them. Standards, if 
they are fit to exist, are as celebrated for their omissions as for 
their affrmations—and the whole, large field of their omissions, is 
left for the private thinker to expatiate in, and indulge his idiosyn- 
cracies. Moreover, these mature brethren have discovered that 
even the great points of Catholic doctrine, the glorious indisputa- 
bles of the Christian church, may be held by the private thinker in 
their substance, while he makes pretty free with their form. Now, 
the substance of the Atonement of the Lord Jesus is, that He 
interposed between man and God in such a way and in such travail 
of soul, that all difficulties, whatever they were, by which God was 
hindered, and could not pardon and save men, were utterly and 
forever taken away ;—but that magnificent generosity which is 
enough to melt all human hearts, has been reduced in some creeds 
to a much more particularized statement (whether true or not), 
which is not scripturally binding on the faith of anybody, and is to 
be subscribed to, if subscribed at all, only out of respect to that 
underlying great truth just mentioned. What the creed is after is 
just that, and I believe in the creed because it is after that ; and as 
to its specific forms of conception for that infinite, its patented 


114 YALE LECTURES. 


abridgements of it, I will not quarrel with them, any more than I 
will with its use of this or that single word in its effort to get out 
what it plainly intends; as, but for nevertheless, or, nevertheless 
Jor but. There are various ways of getting one’s liberty in this 
awful world ;—and old men have found that out. There is no need 
to secrete yourself within the confines of your own parish, and feel 
sore and scared, and never go anywhere, and by and by get your- 
self off into some other vocation, because you are such a black 
sheep. Come upto the meetings. Confer with the chief men who 
have earned the right to speak by authority. Listen to their essays. 
Listen to their unconsidered outgushings when they are excited, and 
under excitement let out the whole truth. Ask them privately for 
some history of the development of their own opinions. And 
when they get through, ask them if they think it is right to hold 
such a budget of views that they never mention, and hear every 
man of them say yes. Young men—and it is sweet in them—con- 
ceive that it is not frank and honest not to make an exposition of 
your entire interior so often as you can get a chance, and especi- 
ally before councils, who have come together on purpose to ravage 
said interiors; but, Brethren, all that councils, or anything else, 
have a right to know about you, are those views in your circle of 
views that are determinative essentially of your spirit and charac- 
ter ; and, which introduced into your preaching, will be determina- 
tive of the spirit and character of the people who listen to you. At 
any rate, come up to the meetings. ‘That is my refrain. 

It may be, that you have gone into some off-color movement 
of thought, that is really and substantially unorthodox. Well, 
come up to the meetings and let us look you over. Perhaps you 
are worth saving. Perhaps if youcan be protected a few years, 
and have your freedom, you will be able to come out where 
we would all like to have you. And there are men among us who 
can protect you. Our annals are pretty full of instances like that. 
When a certain friend of mine, then a boy, was installed pastor of a 
certain church in a city hard by, where he still is after some twenty- 
four years of continuous service, certain councilmen voted against 
his orthodoxy ; and the case went into the public journals ; where- 
upon, an old and eminently orthodox man, pastor for a lifetime 
of a neighbor-church in that city, came to his deliverance, and put 
the entire weight of his venerable authority in for a bulwark around - 
the young man. And his unabated old age stirred itself up intoa 


YALE LECTURES. SCT Iba: 


lovely indignation on the subject. Whether my friend’s solid twenty 
odd years have vindicated the defence then made for him, judge 
ye. But I want you to see that young men had better know the 
old ones, and have the old ones knowthem. The above-mentioned 
grizzled warrior fired up, and opened his guns, because in a pro- 
tractéd council he had arrived at some knowledge of the young 
man ;—and perhaps his youth reminded him of his own days of 
youth, and made him tender and easy to be drawn into an honest 
quarrel. 

So, go to the councils, to the associations, and the general asso- 
ciations, and the conferences, and the church congresses, and 
whatever is up. If you are worth defending, you will be defended. 
And if you need straightening out before you can be defended very 
much, why, the meetings of the Brethren are good for that. There 
is nothing that enables one to see his own views about as they are, 
more than to toss them out into assemblies, and watch the men 
there battle-door them about. Opinions are valid or not, accord- 
ing as they will stand battle-dooring. When I left this Seminary, I 
understood the introduction of moral evil into this universe, first- 
rate and perfectly. I had a way of putting the subject which I 
considered iron-clad, and was willing to put into action in any com- 
pany. But, pretty soon, I put it in, in a debate with a Methodist 
layman, a man prone to tender-hearted views, but intelligent 


withal ; and he made a single remark, which I thought and have _ _ 


thought ever since made an utter ruin of my iron-clad. Men can 
do such things for us. Common men can. There is not an 
uneducated day-laborer in New England—so that he has native 
sense—who may not be a good person to try your theology upon 
and see what he says about it. You do not believe in Materialism. 
Well, go and talk with the Materialists. You have rigged a pretty 
boat of your own, full-sailed, full-sparred, shapely, and flag at high 
mast ; now send her to sea, and let the Materialists blow on her 
with all their winds ;—not by printed essays, and formal volumes 
(all that you have looked into, every leaf, before you made your 
boat), but by arguments, face to face, and by conversations, and 
the whirl of general debate. In that free way all points are hit, 
and all the lights and shades of things are brought out as they 
never are in books. 

Clarify your opinions then in the gatherings of your brethren. 
Give them a chance to sift them for you. They are experts. 


116 YALE LECTURES. 


Certain ancient bones, which had been dug up years ago, went wan- 
dering around the earth to have some man identify them as belonging 
to this or that animal; and no one knew them; even Hugh Miller 
could not tell; but at last they found their prophet in Professor 
Agassiz, who recognized them directly. So much for having Agassiz 
to carry our bones to ;—and so much for having the sense to carry 
them. Go to your wise men with your notions, my Brother. Go 
to the conventions, where you can find them. Go to the councils, 
where their wisdom is likely to come out. 

And much acquaintance with the brethren, makes them valua- 
ble to you in many other ways. When you want a new parish they 
will help you ;—and how can they help you to much purpose, if 
they have never had an opportunity to sample you? When you 
want formal advice on some personal matter, or some matter eccle- 
siastical, they will be glad to obey your call on them, and come to 
you, and put their sympathetic minds into your case. Yes, this guild 
of ours is one of the best. Close-knit, manly, tender, and true, are 
the ties that bind our men together, when we know each other, have 
exchanged pulpits, have worked along side and man to man, have 
stirred up conventions together, have gone out in the Autumn, as a 
general conference, quartering ourselves for days on the unresist- 
ing inhabitants, have fought each other in councils, and, in the 
midst of all, have kept up the flow of our love feasts. 

And speaking of love feasts, reminds me that I intended to 
make a whole separate fifth head, on the kindliness engendered 
among ministers by the meetings they have ;— which kindliness, 
while it is enjoyable, very, as a mere feeling, works out also into 
many utilities. I have said as much, but I have some other thoughts 
in my mind about it. For, instance, how personal contact leads 
on to esteem and affection for those who are opposed to you theo- 
logically, and who have been a little disagreeable to you on that 
account, as likely as not. Or, something else has made them disa- 
greeable. You have heard things about them ;—that they are 
combative—that they cannot preach much—that they gush—that 
they are inexact thinkers—or fanatical reformers—or voluble—or 
ambitious. Many things get afloat, first and last, taking all ministers 
together, and the first movement of the depraved human intellect 
is to generalize upon the whole man from a single unpleasant bit 
of information like that. Perhaps that single thing is all you know 
about him. Some twenty or more years ago, a woman where I went 


YALE LECTURES. 117 


to preach refused to go to the church, because I was a Sabbath- 
breaker, she said. All I did, in those days, was to take a walk 
Sunday afternoons, which I must take or burst, I usually had so 
much steam on. Moreover, she ought to have recollected my 
numerous virtues, and she would have done it if I could have made 
her acquaintance. I shall never forget the first time I saw William 
Lloyd Garrison, and heard him speak. He was a much more lamb- 
like man in his face than I expected to see, and more mild-voiced, 
and more considerate, in fact, in what he said. I had imputed to 
his person the deformity (as I thought it) of his political opinions. 
I fancy that many persons were similarly surprised when they 
’ first met in private the late Dr. Leonard Bacon, and felt the suffusion 
of his geniality and his uncontentious utterance, and his humor 
and sparkle. All they had known was the pound of his trip-ham- 
mer movements against slavery, and other nefarious things: They 
had not been told that his heaven-shaking hammerings, were made 
to be the sounding and awful things they were, by the great heart 
that was in him ;—a heart that did not often cry, but saved itself 
for those strokes of Thor. 

It is best to meet men, and size them on all sides, and take a 
taste of all their qualities. ‘Then, most likely, you cannot hate them 
if you want to. The earnest theology of Father Taylor, the cele- 
brated sailors’ preacher in Boston (it is an old story), had led him 
to locate Ralph Waldo Emerson in a future Hell; but when he 
had met him, and felt his pulse, he did not know where to put him ; 
he said, Emerson’s opinions kept him out of Heaven, and his 
good character kept him out of Hell, and there did not seem to be 
any place for him; though it was evident that Taylor was in danger 
of landing him in Heaven, notwithstanding all his Paganism, 
Pantheism, and big-headed Jupiter-like dubiousness.. Dr. John 
Brown of Edinburgh, in his biography of his father, gives some 
account of a dear old Scotch clergyman, his Uncle Ebenezer, 
who was shaken from his foundations one day, a little as Father 
Taylor was. In his not strong old age, he started across the 
open country, on his pony, in a heavy snow storm, to fulfill an 
engagement to preach. Nobody could dissuade him, and he went. 
And he tumbled over at last, pony and all, and was wallowing in 
his helplessness, when there happened along some rude fellows cart- 
ing whiskey to the town. And they tugged him up and lifted the 
pony, and put the old man on, and dusted off the snow, and ran for 


118 YALE LECTURES. 


a drink of the whiskey for him, which he swallowed gratefully, and 
made a downright tender time over him, rough creatures and 
wicked though they were. ‘ Next presbytery day” (says Dr. Brown) 
“after the ordinary business was over, Uncle Ebenezer rose up (he 
seldom spoke) and said :—Moderator, I have something personal 
to myself to say. I have often said that real kindness belongs only 
to true Christians, but (and then he told the story of those men) 
more true kindness I never experienced than from those lads. They 
may have had the grace of God, I don’t know; but-I never mean 
again to be so positive in speaking of this matter.’’ Well, that is 
the effect of knowing people. It is easy to reason on the wavering 
of Father Taylor and Uncle Ebenezer, and prove that this talk of 
theirs was mere weakness, and that if meeting men leads to compro- 
mising one eternal truth in that manner, we were better not to meet 
them ;—and the less assemblies we have the better—assemblies, that 
is, where various theologies are mixed together. Let Old School 
Calvinists meet only Old School men, and New School men their 
sort, and Armenians their sort, and let ministers who do not know 
what they do think, have assemblies of their own and enjoy their 
own confusion. That seems sensible, perhaps, but not very, to my 
mind. A theology that does not include all the plain facts of the 
creation, as Uncle Ebenezer’s did not, had better be rolled about 
on a snowy moor, and receive gifts of comfortable whiskey from 
the sons of Satan ;—and a theology which does include all facts, 
had better meet in convention, and council, the theologies that do 
not, in order that it may learn to hold the truth in love, by being 
made to love, personally, the false theologians. There is no need 
to surrender anything. It never makes any impression on me, to 
meet an Old School Calvinist—that I could ever see—except that, 
loving him, as I am generally forced to, I take on a habit of stating 
my own theology with the air ofa man who has heard from the other 
side, and knows that there are Old School errorists in the world. 
In the North American Review some time since, Robert Ingersoll 
made a deliverance on and against Christianity, which called out an 
article in reply from Judge Black ; and then Ingersoll spoke again, 
and then there came a word from your own Professor Fisher. And I 
know of no better example of right and wrong polemics, in respect 
of touchiness, dogmatism, and personal animosity, than those two 
pro-Christian articles. Both of those writers show distinctly that 
they have heard from the other side, to wit—from Mr. Ingersoll ;— 


YALE LECTURES. 119 


they both stand front-face to that man, but, O ! the difference in the 
faces! One was almost enough to make Ingersoll glad he is a 
Pagan, and the other ought to make him a Christian. Not merely 
is the intellectual weight of the professor’s statement very great, but 
there is not a flush of emotion throughout the whole which could 
not be conscientiously and gladly undersigned by all Christendom ; 
and Ingersoll himself could not help loving the man who took 
his life so Christianly. 

Now, my thought is that contrary kinds of men be thrown 
together as much as may be, in order that under the persuasion of 
each other’s perceived good qualities, they may not sacrifice their 
principles, but maintain them with a certain lenitude. There is no 
more real push in a battering ram than there is in a Spring sun. 
The ram would pulverize ice effectually, but so would the sun; and 
there would be so much cushion in the push of the sun, as to make 
the ice almost happy to die under the pressure. 

And, after ail, Brethren, the whole end of Theology is love. It 
seems hard to realize that that is so, but so itis. If your theology 
does not make you loving, it has not Christianized you, and to that 
extent is not a Christian theology. All ecclesiasticism, and all doc- 
trinalizing, is in order to character, and the soul of character is love. 
Preach the truth in love, and for the development of love. Go to 
the assemblies of your brethren, for love’s sake. In some cases 
seeing a man may make you dislike him, but I do not think it 
works so with ministers, as a rule. While I write this sentence, I 
am trying to think of a minister whom I know well, that I really 
and rather totally dislike—and I have not recalled one yet. Robert 
Burns wrote an address to the Devil, which ends up with the follow- 
ing bewitching touch of benevolence. Burns had spent some nine- 
teen verses, giving his Majesty a plain statement of his mean opin- 
ion of him, ending with this irreverent snapper : 


An’ now, auld C/oots I ken ye’re thinkin 
A certain Bardie’s rantin’, drinkin, 
Some luckless hour will send him linkin, 
To your black pit: 
But, faith! he’ll turn a corner jinkin, 
An‘ cheat you yet. 


But, suddenly now, from that height of impiety the Bardie 
drops to this flow of the heart: 


120 YALE LECTURES. 


But, fare you weel, auld Wickte-ben / 
O wad ye tak a thought an’ men’! 
Ye aiblins might—I dinna ken— 
Still hae a stake— 
I’m wae to think upo’ yon den, 
Ev’n for your sake! 


It seems to me that we ministers had better keep going to 
assemblies until we have just about that feeling towards the most 
questionable of the brethren. Attack their errors, rebuke their 
faults, lay on and spare not. Do not fail to see the false opinions 
of ministers and other Christians, and their erroneous practices, and 
the flaws and disproportions which make them imperfect in charac- 
ter; but, and at the same time, be lenient and accept them, in the 
large receptivity of love, even as God, for Christ’s sake, has excepted 
both them and you. 


PARISH INCONVENIENCES. 


I shall lecture to-day on what I call Parish Inconveniences, 
using a mild term in order not to frighten you too much at 
first. And as there are a good many of these inconveniences to be 
mentioned, I will plunge into their midst as soon as possible, and 
call your attention, in the first place, to the great subject of small. 
salaries :—a subject on which my views have greatly changed since 
I was first compelled to take an interest in it, long years ago. Ido 
not know but a little income seems little to me even yet (I wish it 
did not,) but my feeling about such a thing for ministers is cer- 
tainly different ; and of course I want to impart to you, that dif- 
ferent, and wiser, and less depressed state of mind. 

When I went out into the Christian Ministry, I was not very 
hilarious in regard to this whole business of the money. I had fot 
the least ambition to grow rich ;—I gave that up totally when I con- 
sented within myself to this special Christian service, and when a 
bright lady in New Haven said to me, then a theological student 
there,—‘“‘ I had as lief take a ticket to the poor-house as to marry a 
minister,” I could not deny that there was a certain show of sound- 
ness in her. I expected to be poor, and was willing to be. That 
did not deject me. But I had been led to expect to be worse than 
merely poor. I thought I might be indecently poor. I thought 
that a great many churches were willing their ministers should be 
indecently poor, and miserable. I did not see why I might not 
strike on just such a people as that. A young man, looking out on 
life, that practical unknown, is easily impressed and needs chirking, 
I found. Whereas, just at that time, certain books had come out, 
in which the shady side of ministerial experience—especially the 
financial side—was presented with a pre-raphaelite realism and 
vigor quite appalling. Those books I read, marked, learned, and 


122 VALE LECTURES. 


inwardly digested, as the Liturgy says, and believed in. And I sup- 
pose now that they told the truth, though they by no means rose to 
the full height of a witnesses oath :—‘‘the truth, the whole truth, 
and nothing but the truth.” 

In addition to these books, for a comfort, I had some recol- 
lection of my father’s pastorates when I was a young thing and 
followed His fortunes while he circulated about the country as an 
itinerant Methodist. As a boy, I contemplated the ministry in its 
utilitarian aspects in the main, and when my clothes were not as 
expensive as I would have liked, and my spending money was 
limited, and when my father had offers from well-to-do childless 
women to adopt me for their own, I charged the whole thing on the 
parishes that we served, and thought they were mean. I now see 
that we were in less want than I thought, and that the parishes were 
not mean ; but so far back as that great day when I stepped forth 
from this Yale School of Divinity, those early prejudices still lin- 
gered with me and assisted the melancholy books just mentioned 
to get an exaggerated hold upon me. 

I tell you those things, my friends, because you are where I 
once was—that is, about to begin life—and may be tried by feelings 
similar to mine, and I want to give you my later, and more mature 
and final views on this matter, as fitted perhaps to head off any 
downheartedness on your part as you survey the years to come. 

Now, I shall admit at the outset, that you must not look to 
make money in the Christian Ministry ;—for the following plain 
reasons. First, your income will not be large enough for that, 
especially as you will, every man of you, see the divine beauty of 
the early, but never-obsolete scripture :—‘“It is not good for Man to 
be alone,’””—and proceed to be married so soon as possible. Ihave 
often thought it would be. good to have a celibate class in the ranks 
of our Protestant Ministry, with a view to service in feeble parishes 
—temporary celibates—but it is a plain case that we cannot have 
them. So ministers cannot make money. Their wives and their 
other luxuries will keep them right up to the limits of their limited 
resources. Next, you will not be parsimonious enough to make 
money on your moderate income—I hope. Next, you will not be 
sufficiently worldly-wise. You will be piously absorbed in your 
subjects, and your parochial work, and what knack for business 
you may have by inheritance from thrifty and managing ancestors, 
will gradually die out of you, probably—until you have only head 


YALE LECTURES. 123 


enough left to draw your salary and pay your debts. Of course, 
once in a while there comes up a minister who defies all these 
rules, and stores away some money ;—he is very saving and 
watchful, and his wife does a world of hard work, and all his 
weaned children are turned to immediate use, and he does 
not squander anything on philanthropies—or possibly nothing can 
kill out of him a natural aptitude for infallible investments, so that 
his minute savings swell, as by an inherent and irresistible expansibil- 
ity of their own; but men of this stamp are rather the exception in 
our profession, and most likely none of you will ever be rich ;—un- 
less you have been born so. And if you have, I am not sure that it 
will be any benefit to you. 

But be not alarmed ;—you will not starve. In other pursuits 
men do, but somehow in ours they do not. The raft is the type of 
our condition ; it is a very wet thing, butit neversinks. Ships do— 
the bravest of them. You may serve most poverty-stricken parishes, 
but you will never starve. I never saw the day when my father’s 
table was not more than sufficiently supplied. I never sat at a min- 
ister’s table which did not have on it more than anyone needed. 
The most meagre one I ever did see—it had such humble signs 
about it that I felt glad to move on and relieve my kindly host— 
was the board of a man with flesh on his bones enough to bring his 
weight to the substantial figure of two-hundred pounds and over ; so 
that, after all, he could not have been much cramped. 

If you happen to become the Minister of a people who are 
decidedly indigent, they will at least be sure to keep you as well as 
they keep themselves, and if they live, you can. Yes, they will try 
to keep you a little better, out of that respect and love for your holy 
office, which is as strong in a poor man’s heart as in anybody’s. 
And, Brethren, it is curious how comfortable one can be on an un- 
comfortable salary. I was once reduced to living on potatoes, 
and even they were carefully counted out, our supply was so small. 
But I suffered no hurt,—neither did any of my party. Some of 
them grumbled, but it was ridiculous. It does us good to get down 
to the simplicities of life, and see exactly what human nature needs. . 
More than potatoes, in the long run, 1 suppose physiology would 
say, but ministers always do have more than that. My first salary 
was eight hundred dollars, but I was as well supplied as I am now 
on six times the amount. Because I had not the wants that I now 


have. And if I had been kept to eight hundred, I never should have 
II 


124 YALE LECTURES. 


had the wants—many of them. It would hurt me now to be 
squeezed back into eight hundred. . I have sprouted far and wide 
since then—a sort of banyan tree—and that original pot would not 
hold me ; but I could have lived without sprouting, if I had had to ; 
and I presume now that some day I shall be called to lop off, and 
lop off, to even less than those original dimensions. And if Iam, it 
_ isin likelihood that I shall feel like a tree that has been trimmed, or 
like a man who has lost his legs. The trimmed tree looks as it did 
before it pushed out those branches, but the having pushed them out 
has gone into its experience permanently, and it will never feel as it 
did before ;—it feels larger, and richer, and much more of a tree—and 
it is a well known fact that a limbless man has a sense of limbs as 
much as he ever had. A human being has a great amount of ca- 
pacity of self-adjustment to changed circumstances, and that is one 
of the tokens of his high rank in the creation. If he is planted ina 
fat soil he blossoms, and if hung in mid-air, he has the persistency 
of a cactus, and keeps green and blossoms, more or less. 

The point at which an educated clergyman most longs for 
money is his library. There you may be called to some real self- 
denial. Possibly you would be a larger man if you could buy more 
books and possibly a more useful man. That last is more doubtful, 
though. Books and wide reading, often make men more heady, and 
unhumble and great-gun-like in the pulpit, than is profitable to the 
hearer who is more stunned than edified if guns shout too loud. 
Still, I must not run down books. We do want.them, and many of 
us want more than we can get. It would disgust me to be confined 
to the one and only full commentary that adorned my father’s 
library, to wit, Adam Clarke’s ;—a commentary of so much less worth 
than many others of to-day that I never think of looking into it. 
There it stands on my shelf,-six octavos, like Czesar’s dust, to stop 
a hole to keep the wind away, I might almost say ;—though I would 
not disparage it. But I need more than such a help certainly ; and 
we all do. 

Well, My Brethren, however large your library, you will still be 
called to much intellectual self-denial, if you are to be a thoroughly 
effective Minister of Jesus Christ. You cannot spread abroad into 
general culture. Much in Science you must omit. Much in Litera- 
ture you must omit. Much, too, in Art. Many modern specialties 
you must be ignorant of, substantially. Scattered along through the 
pews in your congregation, there will be numbers of men who know 


YALE LECTURES. 125 


more than you do along certain lines; lines, too, whither your 
tastes run as strongly as do theirs. ‘That is true of the broadest, 
and strongest and most informed, of us, with our great libraries. 
We must narrow ourselves, in order to force ;—read less than we 
desire, and think less excursively than we desire. You cannot get 
rivers to tide on deep, swift and heavy unless you shut them in nar- 
row runways. 

- But that is the doom of all men. Self-denial and self-speciali- 
zation, with a view to chosen ends, is the law to which the lawyer 
and the physician, the merchant, mechanic, financier, teacher, 
farmer, musician, engineer, and all the rest, must submit. Civiliza- 
tion gets on by these distributions of labor, and these intense and 
narrow concentrations. But, Brethren, I beg you to notice how 
little narrow our specialization is as compared to that of some men ; 
—a banker’s—a tradesman’s—a sea captain’s—a soldier’s—and 
many more. First of all, our vocation means brain-work, and not 
mere fingering in some craft, or brute tugging. And it means brain- 
work in the exercise of all the nobler parts of the brain, the in- 
tellectual parts, the affectional parts, the moral parts. I do not 
think of any pursuit in which a man is more often called to put his 
entire and royal self into the field. Our themes are of the largest. 
The interests we handle are of the largest. ‘The motives we wield 
are large and high. ‘The satisfactions of our office are of the sweet- 
est and purest. So, we can afford to contract ourselves in our read- 
ing a little, and subject ourselves to the loss of some esthetic 
delights and some culture ;—to accept the fact of few costly pictures 
on our walls—and few of those household decorations and furnish- 
ments that are so full of art and so exquisite to the cultivated eye. 

But at this point I make another turn on the money question, 
and inform you that ministers do have secured to them by the work- 
ings of providence a long list of real prosperities. Often they have. 
no money to educate their children, but the children get educated. 
My father could not help me much, but that made no difference, 
except to give me the discipline and delight of doing for myself. 
Minister’s daughters are generally considered very marriageable 
girls—no catch pecuniarily, but the loveliest kind of a catch other- 
wise ; and after all, wedded life does not live by bread alone. Min- 
isters have a good many windfalls. What is a windfall? It is God 
doing the unexpected and surprising. If you pry into a windfall far 
enough, you can explain and show it to be just what might have 


126 YALE LECTURES. 


been looked for; but you had better not pry ;—let it stand as wind- 
fall, and you have the good sensation of it. I had one such when 
in Yale Seminary. Right out of a clear sky dropped that lightning. 
When I was married I had another. It was only two hundred dol- 
lars a year added to my salary, but it showed that windfalls were 
possible in my case. I must not run into the particulars of my own 
life too much, but I wish I might relate to you some things which 
have been told me, by some of my much-straitened fellow ministers. 
The Lord takes care of his own. Serve him, and he will do won- 
ders for you. “The eyes of the Lord run to and fro throughout the 
whole earth to show himself strong, in behalf of them whose heart is 
perfect toward him.’”’ (2 Chron. xvi, 9.) 
Thy power is in the ocean deeps 
And reaches to the skies; 
Thine eye of mercy never sleeps, 
Thy goodness never dies. 

Perhaps you think I am working an optimistic vein. Gentle- 
men, that is the vein to work when speaking of our calling. If we 
were freebooters, or corrupters of men, or landlords grinding the 
poor, there would be no optimism about it; but we are God’s am- 
bassadors of salvation, and we glory in our calling and we know 
that all things work together for our good. You may say to me that 
my lot has been an easy one, and that therefore, it is easy for me to 
indulge in these high-colored remarks ; but as high-colored remarks 
as I ever heard have come from ill-conditioned men, to whom I 
have said in amazement :—How do you live? They have told me 
sometimes in detail, and have made me both to laugh, and cry 
and inwardly shout ; laugh and cry at the mingled pathos and humor 
of their stresses and distresses, and shout at the way they emerged 
from their emergencies, and at the strong spirit of life and gladness 
in their souls in despite of everything, and, in fact, because of every- 
thing and all. I saw a letter from a good and true man, whose 
parishes had always been noticeably undesirable; and it was 
written on chance scraps of paper of various shapes, so that 
it was difficult to track him; but he came out at the end 
with this remark :—“ Brother, I hope you will not look on these 
small bits of paper as in any wise disrespectful to you, but rather as 
one more indication of my spirit of economy, and of the ability I 
have always had, to live without any visible means of support.”” So 
you see, he was not crushed. He could laugh at his own exigencies, 


YALE LECTURES. 127 


and he could pray, and he could trust God. It is not best that 
the worldly prizes in our profession should be remarkably glittering. 
They are glittering enough ; and if they were more so, we should 
have a glut of self-seeking men whom God could not use as the 
vehicles of his grace. I hope now, that without sacrificing truth, I 
have given you a touch of contentment in your minds, in regard to 
the pecuniary side of your life as ministers. 

‘You will remember I began to speak of Parish Infelicities ;— 
I recall you to that idea, and declare unto you in the second place, 
that you will strike an occasional infelicity in the form of inconve- 
nient persons ; such as the disagreeable deacon who has been much 
celebrated in prose and verse ;—and the family that crave an extra- 
ordinary amount of attention ;—and the precise and obstinate lay 
theologian out there in the congregation watching you; and the 
vehement politician who does not wish you to preach politics, as he 
says,—and the contrary person of whom John B. Gough has said to 
us, that when the prayer meeting prayed that he might be removed 
to Heaven, he spoke up from his knees and told them he would not 
go ;—and the men and women that like office and must have it ;— 
and the purse-proud pewholder and the penurious pewholder ;—and 
the immoral man whom you have hit between the eyes by way of 
discipline, and who on that account feels sore—he and all his rela- 
tions—and needs floods of Christian love poured out on him, to 
keep him along—that is, to keep him from making a permanent 
surrender to sin and Satan in desperation, and to keep him in your 
congregation, where, of course, he had better stay, and live down 
his ignominy—O ! there is a good deal of human nature in Chris- 
tian Congregations ; sanctified in some part, to be sure, but not 
perfectly sanctified ordinarily. | 

My receipt for treating all these cases, I will postpone for a 
little, while ” mention as a third possible infelicity which will over- 
take you, that your correctness as a theologian may be heavily ques- 
tioned and you be thrown into some parish peril. Sometimes that 
questioning starts in your parish and gets serious headway, but 
as often it makes its first headway among people outside, who listen 
to you only now and then and know you but fractionally ; and they 
carry the disturbance into your congregation, and set them wonder- 
ing whether they can trust their own ears for the soundness of 
their minister. The short-cut rule for suppressing such riots is just 
to be sound theologically ;—that is all. Think just as they think. 


128 YALE LECTURES. 


That will stop them. . But that rule may seem coercive to some of 
you ; so I will name certain other easements pretty soon. 

Again, an unwelcome theology may not be your only unloveli- 
ness. Your conscience may seem to force you into public deliver- 
ances on various practical subjects in which your people have an 
irritable interest. They are irritable because they are guilty of 
something, or because the thing you discuss has been carried into 
politics and struggled on at the polls, or because some single per- 
son of their number is a conspicuous example of the particular 
matter which your sermon holds up; or because the whole denomi- 
nation to which your church belongs is tumultuated on the subject 
you are moved to unfold ;—it may be temperance that you are on, 
and there right along your middle aisle, in a powerful row of 
respectability, may sit, and sit straight up, half a dozen or more 
men whose ability to purchase a seat at all in that metropolitan 
position depends on the traffic in intoxicating liquors, in one way 
or another ; or you may speak on divorce, because that matter is all 
abroad and it seems therefore a good time so to speak ; but right 
before you is some one who has been divorced and has been mar- 
ried again with the apparent general consent of the community ;— 
or something you say touches the choir, and next Sunday they 
refuse to sing ;—or you do what a friend of mine once did, you 
discharge a battery at these nefarious, cheap stories and colored 
pamphlets that infest the world ; honestly thinking that perhaps, no 
criminals are more plainly criminal than those wretched books ; but 
you have not been long in your parish, and have not learned that 
one of your oldest deacons drives a trade in that Literature ; there- 
fore he feels hurt, as he ought to, and you do not feel so penitent as 
he thinks you should, and there you two men are, to fight it out 
according to the measure of grace given unto each of you. 

Years ago we all had the subject of American Slavery for a 
standing discomposure and risk; and you young ministers can 
hardly imagine what a time we full-fledged birds had over that. 
Some of the ablest and best ministers in the lands were ecclesias- 
tically silenced because they would not keep silent in respect of 
that great sin and outrage. Some ministers were voted down, 
and others were pushed on from parish to parish. I look back 
to my own ministrations at that time, with amusement, amaze- 
ment and admiration. I. was willing to be blown into the 
sky by parish convulsions on that subject, and there are numbers 


YALE LECTURES. 129 


of fine people still living who would have been glad to see me 
go. But asa matter of fact I never went, and here I am, to tell 
you, Beloved, how it is that men satisfy their consciences as 
preachers and still stay on the earth not more molested than is 
good for their patience and welfare. 

Still harping on infelicities, I want to take a moment to refer 
again to the ticklish matter of church discipline. I consider that 
one of the very hardest things to get through in peace. A certain 
lenity, which amounts to laxity in some cases, has come into our 


_ practice in this regard, so that if you wish to ease yourself along 


and wink at many things and keep the people all quiet, you can do 
it, I suppose. But, now and then you will have the plainest kind of 
a duty to perform; and then comes the strain on your wisdom 
and courage. ‘The hard navigation of a case of church discipline, 
comes of the following particulars, I have found. You yourself are 
tempted to slip along from a strictly judicial feeling, into the feeling 
of a prosecutor. This person now up for trial has disgraced the 
Christian Religion and disgraced your church, and you cannot bear 
that he should be let off with no mark of displeasure on him what- 
ever ;—so you shoulder into the case in a manner that is remem- 
bered against you. Again, it is difficult to bring on witnesses. You 
cannot compel people to testify, and where they consent to appear, 
they will go as far as they please and no farther. Again, the jury 
before whom cases are brought, (I speak of Congregationalism,) are 
a mass meeting of men of various ages, and perhaps women—the 
poorest court conceivable in some respects. 

Again, even the officers of your church, the picked men before 
whom the offender is primarily brought, often know little of ecclesi- 
astical law and usage, and even on the common-sense of the case, 
that range that lies outside of law and usage, you will be greatly 
surprised sometimes to see how they will bewilder themselves by a 
confused palaver and outgush of heart on the duty of Christian 
forgiveness. My impression is that most Church Boards will dis- 
charge almost any sort of criminal, if only he declares himself peni- 
tent for what he has done; unless in the person of the minister or 
in some single hard-headed member, there is found a man of robust 
perception, who pushes the case. 

Again, after the offender is properly disciplined, it requires a 
great deal more tact, and large wisdom and divine good feeling 
than many ministers possess, to embrace the culprit-brother and all 


1307en ‘| YALE LECTURES. 


his friends, with a heat of affection adequate to their hurt feeling. 
For they will feel hurt. No matter what the man has done, they are 
likely to feel injured because the church has taken him up so. In 
every case that I have had to do with, that has been true. And 
probably a considerable part of your church will think on the whole 
that he might have been handled more gently. I wonder whether 
there ever was an instance, since church members began to fall from 
grace, where discipline was administered by a unanimous vote. 
Charles Lamb tells of a “gentle optimist,” who could never be 
brought to criminate anyone, very much; and his friends secretly 
agreed to invent a most horrible instance of brutality and state it to 
him, and see if they could not wake up in him some flicker of ethical 
vigor ; but when they had finished, the kind cteature only said— 
“ How eccentric!’’ And that is about as far as many a church 
trial can be brought along. And that is not extremely strange 
when you recollect what a lackadaisical view of Christian Charity and 
Forgiveness has got abroad and what great obstacles ordinarily 
hinder the putting in of clear and overwhelming evidence before a 
Church Court. 

This subject of discipline is so many-sided that I ought not to 
have introduced it all perhaps, unless I could spend an hour on its 
aspects ; but I have done it, and in the few moments so spent I 
fancy I have succeeded in convincing you that when you strike a 
personal church case, you will be likely to feel that you have sailed 
into a storm zone, where you must close reef and steer like a hero. 

I hope, now, that I have not multiplied and magnified the dif- 
ficulties of a minister’s lot till you are weary and ready to be 
alarmed. There is nothing to be alarmed about. All through my 
young days, I heard the church people sing :—“ Must I be carried to 
the skies, on flowery beds of ease,”’ and so on—and who does want 
just that? Who, that is anybody. Remember that these difficulties 
which I have massed before you, do not all come in one day; they 
are scattered along the whole length of the years, here a little and 
there a little, according as you are able to bear them; and perhaps 
there are some of these trials that some ministers escape altogether. 
And if you do not escape them, they will not kill you, provided you 
remember to put into practice a few sentences of sense which I now 
lay down. I did not invent these wisdoms ; they are just a digest of 
what ministers generally find out sooner or later. And the sooner 
the better. 


YALE LECTURES. 131 


And, first. You must preach such solid and good sermons all 
along and live such a solid and good life, that any parish storm 
that comes up by and by will find it hard to upset you. I have in 
mind at this moment a most laborious and lovely parish minister 
with whose affairs I was conversant. He was dislodged from his 
office in quite a gale, simply (as I judged,) because his sermonizing 
had always been more emotional than brainy. He was affectionate. 
He was spiritual. He visited his people with marked zeal and 
acceptability. He served them in their sorrows as no other man 
could. And they could not help loving him. And that tie of love 
was a heavy anchor to windward, when that blow arose. But it 
could not save him. There was a company of particularly intelli- 
gent and also admirable people in his assembly, who had pined on 
the diet he dealt out and had not the heart to hold on to him with 
both hands, when the wind was taking him away. People are afraid 
to touch a powerful man, so to speak. They are in a sort of awe 
before him. It is profane to meddle with him. In that complex 
thing, a powerful man, it may be questioned which is most powerful, 
and most contributes to hold him firm in his parish; his powerful 
preaching, or his good pastoral work whereby people are made to love 
him ;—in other words, whether it is respect for a minister, or love 
for him, that principally makes permanence in his position ; but 
for now, all I care to say is, that anything which binds the man and 
his flock together is so much preparation against that evil and dis- 
tressing day, when he and they, in some agitation, begin to pull on 
the bands which bind them together. People will put up with a 
great deal from some men. The Pastor has made a mistake; he 
has mismanaged a case ; he has preached an inadmissible sermon, 
he has showed favoritism, he has let fall a word of personality, he 
has lost the customary fine poise of his temper; he has developed a 
touch of infirmity that no one had ever thought of in connection 
with him ; but they think as Henry Clay said his constituents ought 
to think of him ;—that gun of ours has been an excellent one 
hitherto, and has not been wont to miss fire; so we will pick the 
flint and try it again. That is the way it works. ‘That is one of the 
incidental and unsought advantages of doing one’s duty with one’s 
might, straight along, for duty’s dear sake. There seem to be 
cyclones in these days, and in some parts, that can almost pull up 
the foundations of the globe ;—and such a whirl as that may get 
into your parish and make all moorings snap! In that case you must 


132) VALE LECTURES. 


go with the wind, and land where you happen to. In some better 
parish perhaps. 

My second advice is ;—keep your temper—always. There is 
no exception to that. You can do it. You are inflammable, but. 
you can do it. I have done it. I was never angry with a 
parishioner yet. I have been grieved—a little—and indignant per- 
haps—but no man of my congregations will say that he ever saw 
me angry with him. I spend my anger on outsiders. I have 
expressed my mind. I have resisted my parishioners. I have 
characterized their doings with a full force of adjectives occasion- 
ally. I have presided in their public meetings when they were hot 
and have argued against them from the chair in a square contest of 
main strength, holding back nothing for fear’s sake; we had all 
passed beyond fear we were so much engaged ;—but neither in 
public nor in private, have I lost my good-naturedness. When you 
lose that you have lost your best strength and your best defence. 

And when I say these things, I do not say them boastfully, but 
only to show that any minister can maintain, I will not say his 
equability, but his temper. It is a dreadful state of things if a man 
must not get excited. I claim the privilege of being roiled as much 
as I please, provided the roiling stops short of outward rages and of 
unbrotherly feelings. It is not unbrotherly to be indignant at a 
man, and call him by the names that he deserves ;—not necessarily. 
You may do all that and have that man feel, in the very moment of 
your roaring, that you have no malignity towards him. Keep your 
temper. When you preach on some explosive public question, keep 
your temper. When your soft-hearted church lets off some mis- 
creant, keep your temper. When some one says that your sermon 
was long, or sophistical, or dull, or that your prayer was tedious, or 
that you have no oratory, or that you do not know how to read the 
scriptures in the congregation ; or that you are dreadful at a funeral, 
or not stylish enough in a marriage service, or not an easy conversa- 
tionalist when you make calls, or that you are ‘“seven-eighths a 
magnificent man and the other eighth a hole,” (as I knew a prom- 
inent church member to say of his minister)—yes, young gentle- 
men, I draw all these illustrations from life ;—but when these 
insufferable observations are made, do you quietly pocket the 
remark, and look as bland as though you had been kissed, and day 
after day consider whether it be not true, that remark, or partially 
true ;—there is great profit in criticism, if you only candidly hunt for 


YALE LECTURES. 133 


it—but be tranquil tempered, I say. ‘“‘ Never resent an insult,” 
said a sensible old minister in my vicinity who had spent a long 
life successfully in one parish ;—he meant, that is the rule for a 
minister. And he did not mean, be a milksop, either; he was no 
milksop himself, but a man of views and vigors. A man of views 
and vigors, but always self-restrained, is always respected ; a man in 
whose composition no downrightness can be discovered, a man of 
timidity and pliability, and no possibility of noble indignation, is 
never ranked so high. 

This keep-your-temper-doctrine which I have been preaching 
I will add to a little and say ;—treat all men in an amiable 
manner; the unlovely parishioner so well as the lovely one; 
the ungentlemanly, the bad, the one who has treated you ill, the 
one who has got wrathy and left your congregation for no good 
reason—no matter who he is; bow to him on the street, bow to 
him on the street when he will not bow to you, say good morning, 
do his family a kindness, speak well of his excellencies ; show him 
that you are not spending your short three score and ten years in 
nursing antipathies and grudges. I have heard of ministers, and 
known some, who, when they feel themselves wronged by somebody, 
will show it in their manner habitually. It is poor business. It is 
imprudent business. It makes you feel unwholesome in your mind, 
and not quite sound morally. It is so much deducted from your 
capacity to manage a parish. 

I know right well how this idea of indiscriminate amiability 
may offend some young men, who are particularly honest and frank. 
They think that you ought to show that you do not feel alike towards 
all people ; that it is conventionalism, in one of its meaner forms 
not to; that a minister who scatters his blandness right and left in 
the fashion that I recommend has come to be professional and un- 
manly, a supple manager more than a man. Let us be sincere if 
we do sour some people, and make some parish losses, say these 
fine-spirited youth. 

Well, I myself used to feel like that. And I acted on it a little, 
in some cases. I never much troubled myself about affronts to me 
(I hardly feel that I ever had any,) but I did enjoy letting some 
folks know that I had a small opinion of them on account of their 
general character and ways. But I have changed ;—changed on 
principle and changed by natural drift. I see now that there is a 
large Newfoundland-dog way of treating such matters, without any 


134 YALE LECTURES. 


loss of self-respect, or lessening of moral perspicacity and moral 
energy. I should dread to be a parish manager, a distributor of 
flattery and lies and hypocritical affection, for the sake of parish 
prosperity ; I should rather swing clear over into gruffness and a 
disagreeable honesty—but there is a midway course that avoids both 
of those extremes. 

First of all it is possible to feel kindly towards all men—really 
feel it, and not imitate it for professional purposes. And how shall 
we feel it? In several ways. If you have a growing sense of your 
own imperfections it will much modify your exasperation at the im- 
perfections of others. Also, if you have a growing habit of recog- 
nizing the praise-worthy traits that are apt to illuminate and beautify 
the worst characters, it will tame down your spirit of criticism in a 
measure. ‘That stingy pewholder of yours, is truthful, clean in his 
habits, honest in his business, and a loyal husband. That highly 
combustible politician, the terror of his precinct, is generous money- 
wise beyond most men. So it goes. People are mixed. There is 
slag in them ;—wholesale sometimes, but there is gold in them too. 

Moreover, it will assist you to be genial with all classes and 
kinds, to just move upon them with spiritual intentions. Begin to 
minister unto them the salvation of the Lord Jesus, and they will 
become wonderfully interesting to you. You cannot hate a man 
whom you are striving to bless. Just there you enter into the secret 
of Christ. He was tender to all, because on a mission to all. 

Still farther, it will assist you to be tranquil and kindly in the 
presence of imperfect men and women, if you put yourself habit- 
ually with a heavy stress into the great themes that belong to your 
vocation. I was never in a fret yet which I could not utterly 
smooth out by looking steadily and long into the grandeurs of the 
sky, or out upon the shoreless magnificence of the sea, or into the 
sublimity of the mountains. And like those infinites are our 
spiritual themes ;—vast, majestic, serene ;—and communing with 
them, all small frictions end, all trivial interests are forgotten, all 
mortal passion dies away. 

When you get close to a man by these several devices, you 
begin to have a sort of enjoyable interest, even in his faults. You 
are amused by them, perhaps. ‘They manifest themselves in ways 
that are humorous to a humorous eye. A high-tempered man is 
an object of seriousness and pity to be sure, but you are often 
shaken by uncontrollable laughter over him, too. All large-natured 





YALE LECTURES. 135 


ministers—ministers of the big-dog build—have some side-shaking 
stories to tell about queer people they have had in their flock, and 
miserably flawed and blameworthy people ; and about disparaging 
remarks which free-spoken and ungracious souls have put forth in 
regard to them, their sermons, and their services, and their well- 
meant efforts to do exactly the right thing. O! these terrible things 
are not terrible, unless you let them be terrible. Just take them 
right and they are of no particular account. Even at the time 
they are as small as you please to make them; and when they are 
looked back upon through the mellowness of many years, they are 
scarcely more objectionable than the irregular forms in a landscape ; 
they melt into the picture of the dear past harmoniously enough. 

I must do my whole duty, I suppose, and exhort you now, 
thirdly, to keep your tongue with all diligence. I heard a much- 
experienced minister say in a charge to a young one whom we 
were installing ;—my brother, as you go about your parish, keep 
your ears open and your mouth shut. It is as hard to hold your 
tongue as it is to hold your temper. You might think that an even 
tempered and amiable minister would be able to rule his tongue, 
but it is not always so. High temper runs into speech, of course, 
but so does geniality. 

Many things grow worse by being talked up. That criticism 
on your sermon wants nothing better than to have you squirm and 
mention it to one and another. As the head of your parish, you 
will naturally be made a confidant by many people, and when you 
have been a long stretch of years in a place, you will be just rich in 
information concerning almost every one about you ; and it will be 
a serious strain on you sometimes, not to use your information and 
set your knowledge afloat. In some conversations you. will nearly 
burst with your knowledge. Both parties to a controversy will come 
to you by night, separately and unbeknown to each other, and load 
you up with their sorrows ; and you must sit through it all with the 
silence of a hypocrite ; only taking care not to be so silent as to 
seem unsympathetic. It is close work and involves a great amount » 
of ability, though there need be no guile in it. You must be a 
sphinx, and a vocal Memnon at the same time. It is easy to be 
vocal; but to be silent and vocal both, to speak words just few 
enough and just numerous enough, and to have the spoken ones go 
to the spot exactly, and do no hurt on the passage thereto ; that is 
the problem. A rifle ball goes to the spot fast enough, but it may 


136 YALE LECTURES. 


kill half.a dozen on the road. Let your words be numbered and 
well chosen. Do not peddle hearsays. Do not have your people 
feel when you meet them, that you are a man that likes to converse 
on personalities. Even innocent personalities one may have too 
much of. Persons are immensely interesting to consider and 
remark upon, but so are subjects and principles and general 
movements, if you once get in the way of them. I had rather die 
than spend my life in a perpetual dribble and run-about of 
personalisms. It fritters your vigor. It fires your curiosity. It 
takes you away from the grandeurs and tranquilizations of legiti- 
mate subjects. It injures your serviceableness. It makes you the 
depot into which the talking people all about feel called to bring 
their chatter. It turns a man into everything that a minister ought not 
to be. Keep still. When trouble is brewing, keep still. Whenslan- 
der is getting on to its legs, keep still, When your feelings are hurt, 
keep still, till you recover from your excitement at any rate. Things 
look differently through an unagitated eye. Ina commotion once, I 
wrote a letter; and sent it, and wished I had not. In my later 
years I had another commotion, and wrote a long letter; but life: 
had rubbed a little sense into me, and I kept that letter in my 
pocket against the day when I could look it over without agitation, 
and without tears. I was glad I did. Less and less it seemed 
necessary to send it. I was not sure it would do any hurt, but in 
my doubtfulness, I leaned to reticence, and eventually it was 
destroyed. ‘Time works wonders. Wait till you can speak calmly, 
and then you will not need to speak, may be. Silence is the most 
massive thing conceivable, sometimes. It is strength in its very 
grandeur. It is like a regiment ordered to stand still in the mid- 
fury of battle. To plunge in were twice as easy. The tongue has 
unsettled more ministers than small salaries ever did, or lack of 
ability. 

My last item of advice, I will name but not expand very much. 
In your preaching you will be independent and courageous, and 
have your people understand you cannot be suppressed where your 
conscience is involved ; but through all this affirmative and down- 
right habit of yours, this frankness of opinion, this freedom to speak 
of their faults and their duties and their mistakes, they must be 
made to see that, in your heart, you are an advisor and not a Pope; 
that after you have spoken forth your word, and put in your influ- 
ence, they are at liberty to hold their own opinions and go their 


YALE LECTURES. 137 


own path ; having perfect assurance that you will not hector them, - 
not fall out with them because they do so. My observation is, that 

churches and congregations here in New England, will receive almost 

anything from an honest and sensible man, provided they are con- 

tinually sure of that one concession from him. Ministers sometimes 

feel so responsible for their people, that they cannot let them alone 

when they think or do what they cannot approve. “I must give an 

account of them before God,” say these anxious men; and they 

interfere, not in the large way of counsel only, but in pestering ways ; 

in sputterings, in contrivings and stratagems, and pious circumven- 

tions of their people, and affectionate irritabilities—the fidgeting of 
anervous mother rather than the masculine largeness and repose of 
a man who means to do his duty, and then fall back on God, and let 

Him defend his own truth. 

It is possible to carry great loads of loving anxiety for your fellow 
men, and want them to do thus and so, tremendously, and preach 
about it, and yet not let your desire carry you into pettifogging endeav- 
ors, and puttering and lying awake nights, and seeming to have a con- 
trary spirit, and a desire for your own way. A man in the leader- 
ship and presidency of a parish, is in a position so responsible that 
the longer he lives the more insufficient he feels ; but after he has 
done his duty in an earnest and manly way, in any given case, the 
responsibility passes over upon God, and upon that person, or that 
people, to whom he has ministered, preached his sermons, re- 
iterated and urged his doctrine, addressed his private entreaty, 
and fairly exhibited his pastorly heart. 

I have now finished my rules for getting along with parish in- 
conveniences. And for your encouragement, I will say ;—I 
personally know many ministers who are practical exponents of 
these rules. And for your still farther encouragement, I will add, 
I can point you to a large number of ministers who fail more or 
less in some of the things I have mentioned, but who manage 
parishes with large success nevertheless. They are weak at one or 
two points ;—being too sensitive for example ;—but they are so 
strong at all the other points, that when you come to add them up, 
(and that is just what their parishes gradually do) ; their preaching, 
their pastoring, their executive ability, their advisory weight and 
skill, their felicity on special occasions, their shining qualities at a 
genteel tea-party, their serviceableness in the affairs of the town, and 
all the rest of their powers, faculties, attributes, and decorative 


138 | YALE LECTURES. 


uses ;—add them, I say, and get the sum of them—they are truly 
men who, once settled in, over, and on, a congregation, can stay 
there as long as a man is apt to care to stay anywhere in this 


migratory generation. 





CEREMONIAL OCCASIONS. 


I shall spend an hour with you this time on the ceremonial 
occasions in which ministers are so often called to officiate. 

I began life myself as an extreme anti-ceremonialist, and look- 
ing back for some explanation of that, I find the following things to 
have been true ;—and I mention them, because some of you may 
be in the same darkness and misconception in which I was, and as 
I have come out of it, and know why and how, I have a conceit 
that, if I am speeded, I may at least start you out of it. Speaking 
in a Congregational Seminary, I should not feel free to carry you 
all off into downright Ritualism, if I could; but I do feel free to 
give you some liturgical and ceremonial exhortations, it having been 
unanimously agreed even by Congregational churches, that cere- 
mony and order, in some kind and measure, are both necessary and 
wholesome. 

I think that my individualistic theorizings went a long way to 
make me an enemy of ceremonies. If my personal relations to 
God make the whole of religion for me, and all associational relig- 
ious life is a profane intermeddling with my sacred privacies, of 
course public religion and ceremonies are out of the question, for 
they are associational ; they are a combination of numbers of per- 
sons to do certain things together, in the same place, and at the 
same time; their being in them throughout an implication that _ 
religion is as much a manward thing as a Godward. When we 
move in ceremonies, (I speak of religious ceremonies) we are after 
three things; we seek the benefit to ourselves of self-expression ; 
we seek the benefit to ourselves of the united expression of others, 
by word or act or both ; in our presence ; and we seek a benefit for 
others in the same two-fold way, they expressing themselves each 


one and having the good of it, and at the same time having the 
12 


140 YALE LECTURES. 


immense good of seeing and hearing all the rest. In all this action 
and interaction there is a combined movement on God, to be sure, 
and a responsive movement on his part ; but what I expressly wish 
to bring out is the intensely social and corporate character of all 
ceremonializing. It is as completely opposed to individualism in its 
absolute form, as anything can be; and in so far as a man is indi- 
vidual and insular, he must abhor ceremonies ; and even Quakerism, 
with its silentness, is too ceremonious for him. 

Another dissuasive from ceremonials which had much strength 
with me, as it has with millions more, was the tendency of such 
things to Formalism ; that instinctive make-shift of the human soul 
when it would seem pious without being it. I thought, the more 
ceremony is amplified, the more inevitably will formalism get in— 
so that our only safety is to back off from the whole thing into 
speechlessness, and non-expression, so far as practicable. Particu- 
larly in the case of ministers, I said that ceremonies full, sonorous, 
and spectacular, must be disadvantageous. They (the ministers) 
stand at the head of the multitude, the major-generals of the occa- 
sion, their voice leading all the voices, their pantomime leading all 
the pantomimes, and they swollen with the same feeling that a rud- 
der must have when, by the least motion of its own little self, the 
great bulk of the great ship is made to sway. And I think even 
yet that there is a considerable force of self-consciouness and strut 
in this officialism, if the minister does not look out for himself. I 
have felt it in the plain and modest liturgies and pomps of my own 
congregation. 

Another thing that condemned ceremonials for me, was their 
unwieldiness when we want to move out aggressively upon the mas- 
ses, the non-church goers, and the mighty multitudes and majori- 
ties who have never been schooled in ceremonies, do not know 
their meanings, and look upon them therefore as an elaborated 
pomposity in the main. 

Also I was averse to ceremonials, because I was, soul, body 
and spirit, part and parcel of a democratic social order. In a state 
of society where the theory is, and the feeling is, that one man is as 
good as another, it is unavoidable that ceremoniousness between 
man and man will decline ; manners will simplify ; obeisances, saluta- 
tions and the innumerable forms of elaborate respect, will be 
abridged ;—officials will be inaugurated in simple ways, and after 
they are inaugurated will not be hedged about by awful observances ; 


YALE LECTURES. 14] 


they can be approached without a half hour spent in formalities, 
and they can be spoken to in ordinary respectable English and 
even in slang if the visitor does not know any better, rather than in 
the inflated adulation of an Oriental court; while the costume 
you wear on the august occasion, may be according to your own 
fancy pretty much. 

Well, in this decadence of stateliness and high-wrought gen- 
tility and formalism, under the influence of the democratic idea, 
the people fall out of the habit of ceremony and the relish of it, 
so that even when they pass into the field of religion and approach 
the Most High God, and make up rounds of worship wherein they 
shall operate together in congregations and in multitudes, they dis- 
incline to detail, copiousness, resonance and pomp ; and trust to a 
few plain things. 

If any of you, my Brethren, are cordially averse to ceremony, 
I presume you have felt now, as I have passed on in the explana- 
tions, that I was touching the depths of your case. Very well, how 
did I get out of these depths. I think that being a minister, and 
being compelled to speak and act and officiate, and go on parade 
sometimes, whether I wanted to or no, (as at weddings for example), 
demoralized me somewhat and made me feel that creatures of sense 
may reasonably indulge in a spare amount of form. What was said 
of error, may be said of ceremonies :— 

Seen too oft, familiar with her face, 
We first endure, then pity, then embrace. 

_ And this movement of mine was assisted by the plain failure 
before my eyes of individualism, when applied to life. I saw that 
individualism amounts to the dissolution of society and a practi- 
cal nullification of the second great commandment :—‘ Thou shalt 
love thy neighbor as thyself.”” It cannot be defended. Moreover, 
I saw that all Christian bodies had consented to ceremony and were 
in it ;—some of them all over,—so that the question :—“ Shall we 
have ceremony?” has been decided by the common sense of man- 
kind ; the sanctified common sense and the unsanctified ; the only © 
question remaining to discuss being the quantity and the quality ot 
the thing. The only Christians that undertake not to consent to 
ceremony are the Quakers; and with what success I will answer. 
The two forms in which ceremony embodies itself are, words and 
gestures or acts, said words and gestures being assisted to be all 
they can be by our various surroundings. Our Quaker brethren have 


142 YALE LECTURES. 


gone in on those two points with all their might and have given us 
public services without architecture and the colors of art, without 
ecclesiastical costume, without music, without formal and united 
acts, and often without one word spoken ; nevertheless I never felt 
myself under such an incubus of ceremoniousness as in their assem- 
blies. In the first place, their worship is evidently a prescribed 
thing ; no such result as that worship of theirs could come of any- 
thing but a conspiracy ; and the moment a service is prescribed, it 
begins to take on a formal character. Let one of our Congrega- 
tional churches, accustomed to worship in the unpompous old- 
fashioned way, do so simple a thing as to print its order of service 
and put it in the pews, thus notifying mankind that it has an order, 
and does not move in pure spontaneity ; and that act is distinctly 
formalizing in its influence. It originated in an increase of the 
liturgical spirit in that church and it fosters that spirit. So the 
Quakers. That service of theirs is carefully and rigidly fore- 
ordained ; and you feel that it is fore-ordained all through you, 
when you sit in it; and you are ritualized to that extent. That, in 
the first place, I say. 


Next, while they repudiate vestments, they are costumed in an 
almost more than fore-ordinated uniform ;—a religious uniform, 
because although they wear it on all social occasions yet it is put 
on from a religious impulse and for religious purposes, as much so 
as the solemn robes of a nun. 

Next, they are massed in their meeting-house in a certain 
noticeable order, men together and women together, and dignitaries 
together always ; as much ordered, thus and so, as the guests at a 
state dinner with a king. And those artificial rows of human 
beings work an effect on the mind of a sensitive beholder precisely 
like the effect of that elaborated action which you see in ritualistic 
assemblies. 

And next, their silences are immensely vocal, so far as all the 
ends of impression are concerned ;—and are meant to be. They 
are a powerful preaching of their particular doctrine of the Inner 
Light ; that, at least. I do not think of any way in which it could 
be better preached than by resolutely sitting still and waiting for it. 
They thus eloquently say :—-God in the mind is indispensable, and 
all utterance on religion without him is mere human forwardness 
and very near an awful crime ; moreover, to have God in the mind 
is feasible and to be looked for. That is very loud doctrine, even 


YALE LECTURES. 143 


if they adopt a silent form of saying it. I beg you to believe that 
I do not say these things as disposed to fault that excellent body of 
Christians. I am only earnest to show that non-ceremoniousness 
may put itself forth in a powerfully ceremonious manner, and may 
even get to itself the whole essence of formalism in a formal, com- 
bined effort to put formalism down. I believe that is often done ;— 
and not alone among Quakers. 

‘Here I am liable to be asked :—Why should we desire to 
increase Form, if the whole effect of Form can be secured under 
usages uncomplex and bare, as in the case of Quakers. To that I 
reply :—There are many truths and many feelings that cannot be 
expressed by a silent sitting in premeditated rows, and other like 
simplicities. Neither can we get full expression for our myriad- 
minded selves, even through words, to whatever extent they are 
multiplied. A great advance in expression is made when words are 
joined to music and they together, carry a theme. I am not 
going to say anything against the possibilities of expression and 
impression that are in preaching ; but I have been made to know a 
thousand times in my own experience that music can beat us all, 
especially in its play on the feelings and in its power to voice the 
feelings. 

But in addition to words and music, we need ceremonial 
actions and routines of action, in order to a really complete formu- 
lation of ourselves and a full stroke on our sensibilities. The Inner 
Light is profoundly worth preaching, but so are the Incarnation, 
and the Cross, and the Resurrection, and Regeneration, and a score 
more ; and they never get preached in their full strength and with 
its own proportionate emphasis on each one, except through a cere- 
monial that has variety, and amplitude and the completeness of 
real art. You do not like to have me speak that word Art in con- 
nection with worship, but I speak it because I know that expression 
is an art, and in any case where expression is not thoroughly artistic 
in the sense of thoroughly conformed to the established laws of art, 
in its structure and organization, as also even in so secondary and 
superficial a matter as its ornamentation, if it has any, there is a 
failure as respects those great substantial uses which expression seeks 
to secure. 

These are some of the reasons why I have come to see some 
sense in ceremony. Being a religious official I had to see some 
sense in it, or leave the ministry. Being brought to see that indi- 


144 YALE LECTURES. 


vidualism, as I held it, was practically un-Christian, and that asso- 
ciated worship is as important as private worship, there was nothing 
left for me but to fall into the ceremonies by which alone associated 
worship can formulate itself; especially in any complete and bal- 
anced formulation. Being brought to see that the minimum of 
form does not necessarily imply the minimum of Formalism, and 
that ample Form does not necessarily imply a corresponding ampli- 
tude of Formalism, but that we may have Formalism in its entire 
spirit, its entire self-obfuscation, pride, and curse, under a ritual 
whose one boast and joy is that itis not a ritual at all ; being brought 
to see these things demonstrated in life, and demonstrated by rea- 
sonings on the motive of the case, as well as readings in the Bible, 
I was not disobedient to my light, but succumbed ; and there stay. 

As to the unwieldiness of an expanded ritual for purposes of 
propagandism among the un-Christianized, all I have to say is that 
those Christian bodies, if there be any which will not go out to the 
battles of the Lord except as accoutred just so always, must suffer 
the disadvantage of their own stiffness. I am not familiar with all 
communions, but I have an idea that Romanism, with all its devo- 
tion to externalism and precision, has generalship enough to limber 
itself to the circumstances of almost any situation, so that while in 
St. Peter’s she will give you a first-class specimen of ritual, with all 
possible accessories for the eye and the esthetic sense, she will also 
on occasion strip herself of these and stand out bare in fighting 
trim, absolutely unencumbered and athletic. When I was in her 
queen city, Rome, Sunday after Sunday in the afternoons, I heard 
her much praised orator, Father Tom Burke, address a large assem- 
bly in English, on the points of controversy between Romanism 
and Protestantism ;—and I recollect this admirable fact, that the 
time spent in ritualizing us was not so long as a good, solid Con- 
gregational long prayer. At the end of that brief prelude the priest 
went into the pulpit and argued with us for an hour. That was 
sense. We were not there and were not invited there to see 
Romanism in the full glory of her ceremonial, but to be labored 
upon by the reason, and Father Burke confined himself to the busi- 
ness of the occasion. Let us have ceremony, but let us be all 
things to all. 

With respect to the dislike of ceremony among democratic 
peoples; while the decline of ceremony between man and man 
may be admissible, on the ground that ranks are abolished and 


YALE LECTURES. 145 


every man is as important as his neighbor ; surely it is no inconsist- 
ency to magnify ceremonial, when we come to Him to whom all 
earthly personages are less than nothing and vanity. 

You have noticed thus far that while I have shown myself not 
unfavorable to ceremony, I have not undertaken to make precise 
statements as to the amount of it that we, non-liturgical people, 
were well better admit. My opinion is, that there is a preparedness 
in the Congregational mind (let me speak of that as being ac- 
quainted with it) for a ceremonial advance in two directions ; 
namely, in the quality of what ceremony we already have, and in 
the quantity of it. Better, and more of it, that is the idea. First, 
better. 

Under that head, I can hardly speak my whole mind without 
seeming ungracious. I continually admire the liturgical success of 
my clerical brethren under the difficulties of their situation. The 
one gigantic difficulty is the habitual extemporization to which they 
are committed. It is required of them—that is, the ideal of Chris- 
tian worship requires of them, as do also the congregations as they 
advance in the graces of civilization—that they make their worship- 
ful utterances and lead the people in lucid English, in orderly 
English, in simple English, in solid English, in English sufficiently 
copious and yet not jejune, in English that knows how to stop int 
ten minutes at the most and yet that can in that time sweep the 
circuit of the entire creation ; in unrepetitious English, in English 
that while it is standard and beyond substantial criticism, is so far 
suffused with the personality of the author, his thought and his feel- 
ing, that it is fresh and relishable ; in English that recollects both 
God and the congregation, but in recollecting the congregation does 
not succumb and make a speech instead of a prayer; in English that 
ranges the entire assembly sympathetically and gathers up the 
thoughts of many hearts and the burdens of many souls and car- 
ries the whole to the Heavenly Father in a true intercession; in an 
English, in short, which no mortal ever spoke extemporaneously, 
except in good moods and in good wafts of the Holy Spirit. And — 
even then the moods and wafts may be so good as to carry him 
along into an affluence which seems redundant and protracted to 
unsympathetic sinners. The demand for the best is growing, I say. 
The real best—not the artificial best. No slovenliness of utterance. 
No bad grammar. No untasteful allusions. No words with over- 
mundane associations clinging to them. No colloquialisms. No 


146 ‘YALE LECTURES. 


free-and-easiness in the presence of the Most High. No senti- 
mentalism of religious affection. No windiness of self-conscious 
rhetoric. No listening to the modulations of your own voice. No 
rages, as though you could not hold in your own Godly emotions. 
No dreariness and soliloquizing instead of praying. No lashing 
yourself up to a hypocritical animation. No personalities. No 
photographic description of all the virtues of the deceased in your 
prayer at funerals, and no extended recognition of all his relatives. 

And while you are careful of your speech, you must be careful 
how you act. I saw Mr. Spurgeon officiate at the Lord’s Supper, 
seated throughout and with his two legs lifted into a neighboring 
chair. I did not ask him whether it was the gout that did that, or 
his preliminary few words of talk on the fact that Christ’s last Pass- 
over was a familiar meal whereat the participants half reclined. I 
do not criticise him ; but you must behave, where you are master of 
ceremonies. I was at an ornate and numerous wedding in a church 
where the officiating minister stood cater-cornered to the bride and 
groom, instead of in absolute face-to-face. He should have been 


more ceremonious. Perhaps he did not like the very considerable 


show before him and took that way to sayso. Perhaps he had 
been wont to assume irregular attitudes in his pulpit, by way of get- 
ting himself into liberty. Perhaps he did not care how he stood, 
and having happened to strike that sidelong position at the begin- 
ning, kept it; a little thing. But we had better care. 

I was told of a Congregational minister who would place his 
hat on the communion table always when he passed into the pulpit, 
and of a remote deacon (a Baptist he happened to be) who was 
seen to bring the bread of communion to the church in his pocket 
handkerchief and cut it with his jack-knife ; and I have officiated 
in a few churches where, when I said 4¢ us pray, to my amaze- 
ment almost no one bowed, so little sense of ceremony had the 
Christians there ; all of which cases and forty more I would men- 
tion as strong illustrations of what unceremoniousness or lack of 
the ceremonial feeling may lead to. The gravity of these misde- 
meanors lies right there, in their lack of ceremonial feeling. The 
minister who liked to have his hat stand on the consecrated table 
and who was driven out of his parish, at last, in a quarrel that 
started in that persistent act of his, was not a sacramentalist, you 
may be sure; he did not believe in Formalism but in a spiritual 
religion. What is a table ?—so much wood fashioned into a certain 


a 


YALE LECTURES. 147 


shape by a carpenter ;—and what are bread and wine and why 
should there be any particular parade over them? What they sig- 
nify is important, but they are simply bread and wine, and no act 
of any official can make them more than that. So ran his mind 
doubtless, and any act of minor irreverence which he committed, 
was a growth from his unceremonialism. Not every unceremonial- 
ist will violate decorum and come short of the full ideal in his 
ceremonial ministrations, in really gross ways; but in lesser ways 
they all are apt to fail. Many men have not the ceremonial instinct 
in them strong enough to really get into the meaning of a service, 
—and if they are not thus in the service they are sure to blunder 
in conducting it. Take prayer. Prayer has in it certain essential 
elements. It is made up of confession, intercession, and kindred 
ideas, and the minister knowing that, has a perpetual guide in his 
public outpourings ; and while in any given prayer he may press 
confession, or thanksgiving, or some other one part, more than he 
does the other parts ; take him year by year, he is sure not to vio- 
late the proportions of things and lead his people in the line of a 
one-sided culture. He knows what prayer is, constituently, and 
thus his knowledge of the ideal is his constant safeguard. 

Or take a whole service, in its many particulars. Those par- 
ticulars are to be thrown in together in some sort of order, but why 
in one order more than another? Why should the sermon come 
here, and not there? If there are three or four prayers in the ser- 
vice, how should they differ from each other? Should they differ 
at all? Should a Christian service move towards a climax, like that 
supreme and awful moment in the Roman mass when the Host is 
elevated? Is there any natural crisis in our communion service, or 
any gradation of interest whatsoever—or shail we strike the major 
chord of the occasion, and strike it with all our might, when we 
first open our lips, and spend the rest of the hour in just a tiresome 
reiteration of that main stroke? , 

So in a wedding. What is a wedding? We stand up and 
some transaction is to be gone through with. What we are after is 
plain enough. We intend to make that man before us, and that 
woman, one for life. But that end is to be made sure by a certain 
complex formality ; quite complex, if it be looked into enough. 
What are those complexities—exactly? A prayer is to come in, 
one or more, probably. Well, how much of possible prayer shall be 
let into that prayer? Shall you spread abroad upon the general 


ee 
—— 


148 ; YALE LECTURES. 


themes of the Christian Salvation? Some officiators seem to feel 
that all the great topics they may omit, are thereby dishonored. So 
they aim always to at least allude to those momenta, no matter what 
the occasion nor how specifically limited. And that is the reason 
that prayers on express occasions are often so enormously spun out. 

I once saw a minister baptize a child; and what did he do? 
Do? As near nothing as possible. I suppose he baptized it, 
because he sprinkled the little head with water and repeated the 
customary Triune sentence. And he did offer a prayer one minute 
in length. But he spoke the formula and he spoke the prayer in 
a tone that had no atmosphere about it, it was as bare of sugges- 
tiveness and magnetism as the human voice could be when recit- 
ing a table of statistics. I say,that minister had not studied the 
significance of infant baptism and gone into the subject so that he 
could see it from the inside, the vast inside. If he had, he would 
have swelled a little and vibrated ; and not merely would he have 
personally dilated, but he would have been inclined to swell his 
ceremony most likely, by certain quite feasible additions. Suppos- 
ing he had called on his choir to chant :—“ Suffer little children to 
come unto me and forbid them not ;”’ or supposing he had himself 
read that passage. Supposing he had said a few words to the 
parents. Supposing he had expanded his curt prayer to include 
the undeniable items and ground facts of child-baptism. Supposing 
he had Romanized the occasion to the extent of half a dozen inno- 
cent little particulars which I might name, winding up with a suita- 
ble shout from the choir—yes a shout: “Glory be to the Father, 
and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost!” For what in all life more 
deserves to be shouted over, than such a scene as that, with its 
unutterable, tender and glorious implications. 

What I am insisting on.all along here is, that ministers need 
to perceive the real contents of a service or ceremony before they 
can be trusted to conduct it. Except as they grasp the rationale 
of it, they are likely to mar it, any minute. They put in imperti- 
nences, or leave out pertinences, or shackle along under the law of 
haphazard, or their movement is a hitchetty-hitch when it should 
be flowing. How much there is in that last! A service often will 
have pauses in it and misjoints that amount to breaks and jolts 
and are to you like riding over a rough road ;—the clergyman and 
his choir do not lap on to each other perfectly ;—he does a thing, 
and then they do something, and then he does something else, and 


YALE LECTURES. 149 


the transitions from thing to thing are jerky ; whereas they ought 
to be like the silent flow of curves. Or the minister and the peo- 
ple, take up the Psalter responsively and the two do not seem to be 
in the same key of feeling; they operate independently of each 
other; he and they responding should make a melodious oscilla- 
tion, whereas it is crank-work they are in, more nearly—and he is 
responsible for it ;—for if he really understood his service and had 
a good warm ceremonial consciousness and enjoyment of cere- 
mony, a delight in seeing it move according to its own instinct (for, 
evermore, ceremony because it is ceremony, likes to move off 
beautifully and impressively), then these infelicities in his service 
would not appear, he would get himself and his choir settled to- 
gether in a close co-ordination, and he would pull his people out of 
their mechanicalism by the inspiration of his voice and the elan of 
his leadership. 

Our non-liturgical churches more and more demand these 
gifts in ministers—I say again. ‘They want their traditional forms 
made the most of. They want them to be operated in a cultivated 
manner. It is as easy to save souls in the use of good English, as 
bungling English ; in the use of good taste as coarse taste, in the 
enjoyment of an ordered and commanding ritual as in the enjoy- 
ment of a ritual whose pride it is to be no ritual, but spontaneity 
and lawlessness. 

If there is among us this desire that our inheritance of Forms 
be used in the best manner, it is to be looked for also that our peo- 
ple will tolerate some addition to our old forms. I believe they 
will. They are doing it in many churches. They are ready to 
make a great deal more of music than the Fathers did. They see, 
as they were not used to, that music is a substantial element in 
worship, and not a mere decoration and a dangerous one. The 
old plain hymn tune that anybody can sing is good, and countless 
souls have been helped on by their privilege in that plain work ; but 
music that nobody can sing save a trained vocalist, may also be 
good—first-rate—and if the choir and their minister can start a 
back-and-forth between them, wherein some godly theme shall be 
tossed to and fro in a manner to make it shine and show all its 
phases, that also is first-rate and fascinating ;—and if the congrega- 
tion please to make a unison movement on some creed that they 
like, or on the Lord’s Prayer, that is good ;—and if they enjoy 
handling the scriptures responsively, there is no hurt in that ;—and 


150 | YALE LECTURES. 


if they want to flush the ceremony of the Holy Supper with some 
new colors and extend its particulars till they fill the whole time of 
the Sunday morning, as feeling that a rite so central and so stocked 
with holy and tender meanings, and so full of grace for sinful men, 
will bear a whole morning put upon it ; very well, let them expand ; 
there is nothing uncongregational in that. And if. they abjure bar- 
ren baptisms, both infant and adult ;—and if in this advance of 
ceremony in ordinary worship their extraordinary occasions begin 
to advance ; their weddings, their funerals, their dedications, their 
anniversaries, their days of Easter and Christmas and the like ; it is 
no wonder and who can prove there is any disadvantage in it? I 
select these illustrations from what I have seen among our people 
in these latter years. I was at a communion service recently in 
one of our own churches, which went on in this manner: ‘There 
were various exercises of a general nature, which consumed more 
than half an hour. They were general, as not taking the assembly 
into the very heart and full stress of the Supper; and yet they 
artfully and sweetly preluded the Supper. Then the minister 
descended to the table and read that rich passage in Isaiah :—‘ He 
was despised and rejected of men,” the choir chanting the alter- 
nate sentences in a quiet minor movement ;—which minor move- 
ment rose into something more joyful as the minister led on into 
sentences of invitation :—‘‘ Come unto me all ye that labor and are 
heavy laden,” and the like. Then a short address was read from 
the Communion office of a certain branch of the Christian church, 
also the history of the institution of the Supper from the same 
Office. Then an extemporaneous prayer was offered, not two min- 
utes long ;—-a prayer of consecration strictly. It could be thus 
brief because it simply asked God to turn those natural elements, 
there offered to him, to a divine use. Then the bread was broken 
and distributed in silence ; and after that, while the minister filled 
the cup, the choir chanted in a subdued and refined passage: “O, 
the sweet wonders of that.Cross, where my Redeemer loved and 
died.” The cup was passed, and then the minister moved forth 
into a large and free range of prayer, through every word of which 
though, you could hear, now near and now afar off, the tone of 
Christ’s mediatorial passion. There was a considerable mention of 
persons and classes, and among the rest an express commendation 
of the departed, made express by a preliminary noticeable pause, a 
dropping of the voice, and a use of the beautiful collect for All 


YALE LECTURES. 151 


Saints’ Day in the Protestant Episcopal Book of Common Prayer. 
Then all stood up and chanted together in a full, unanimous out- 
pouring, the good. words of the Gloria in Excelsis ;—‘“ Glory be to 
God on high, and on earth, peace, good will towards men.” And 
the service closed with the benediction. 

Now let alone the exact philosophy of that Order, and even 
admit if you want to, that it was untruly organized here or there, 
you can see in it.a tendency towards ritual liturgical touches, coy 
dallyings with Form, longings to get the Supper out into a generous 
statement ;—and you can see, I submit, how practicable, harmless 
and serviceable, well-managed dallyings may be. And this kind 
of thing is going on all about, and is permitted to go on and will 
be; and you, young gentlemen, are going out into this world to 
favor it, or to oppose it. My hope is that you will favor it, and 
direct it and make it reasonable. 

I have indulged myself in two lectures to you on Imagination 
in ministers, as theologians and as sermonizers—I hope you will not 
feel totally worn out with that word, if I gratify myself a little once 
more, and conclude this hour with the thought that no man can 
manage ceremony as it deserves to be managed, except as he enters 
into it imaginatively. 

Take a wedding. The atmosphere of the occasion requires 
some suffusiveness and glow on the part of the minister ; and mag- 
nanimity—magnus, animus—a mind sized up to the height of the 
hour. Well, how shall he be sized up, that poor, limited mortal? 
In one way only ;—by a solar vision of the tremendous contents 
of a wedding. The flowers and the music and the gorgeous 
costumes, and the showy bridal procession, and the manifold 
pulsation, are a brilliant notice served on him that the occasion 
has contents ; but it is a notice addressed to his imagination, chiefly. 
It is an occasion of delight, of anticipation, of memory, too, of 
uncertainty, of solemn and tender certainty ; the whole preceding 
life of the parties concerned is in it and their whole coming life 
and their eternity ; there is in it their youthful view of the act and 
also the parental view, also the rather numerous views of the emo- 
tional spectators manifested in nameless out-bubblings, great and 
small ;—it is a time of delights and it is a time of tears ;—and a 
clergyman who stands in front of all this, without the faculty to 
read these glittering signs and signals hung out, without the faculty 
to enter realistically into the feelings of the parties and all parties, 


152 YALE LECTURES. 


and create the occasion from the interior, is a sad piece of insuffi- 
ciency. He may make some observations, he may proceed to invent 
a prayer produced:from the depths of his own unperceiving mind, a — 
prayer born of hearsay as to what it probably ought to be at such a 
time ; or he may assist himself by a printed ceremony which he 
reads ; but all he does fails to rhyme with the surroundings ;—he is 
outside of the surroundings, and they are outside of him ;—he is 
Mr. Gradgrind consciously discharging a function, but this specta- 
cle has no Gradgrind element in it; his tone as he reads that 
printed page is literal and colorless, and the liturgic page therefore 
is outraged—what are those old offices in the books, in reality? 
printer’s ink and white paper spread out? forms of far-away hear- 
say? is that the whole account? No. In these carefully preserved 
and dear forms, we have, first, a pretty entire condensation and 
practical digest of the main realities of the several occasions which 
they profess to voice; and besides that, a sound of foregone ages, 
a mighty murmur of assemblies back and back, tones of the living, 
tones of the dead, holy offices are they verily, most plural, plenary, 
mystical and immeasurable, and the voice of the clergyman who 
officiates in them must in some measure show this plenitude of 
things, else they are robbed, and a wedding or a funeral, or any- 
thing else, that tries to get itself spoken forth through them is 
defeated and comes forth in insufferable abridgements, mutilations, 
and unvoluminous and unrotund pretenses of utterance. So have I 
myself heard these forms dishonored by individual clergymen, 
even in liturgical churches ;—and, parallel to this, I have heard 
extemporized forms made to labor in the same disability ; the fun- 
damental infirmity in the whole business being that the clergyman 
could not be a bit inflamed in his imagination. 

It might seem that an occasion so sombre as a funeral, does not 
give much range for this bright faculty, these visions, and these crea- 
tive flights. Imagination is not a bright faculty, any more than 
memory is, or reason, or conscience. They are all bright or dark, 
according to the ranges in which they happen to be called to fly. 
See Dante, see Milton, with a gravity deep as the grave, when treat- 
ing grave things. See all great poets when they address themselves 
to that thing of glooms and gleams, human life. The truth is, Imag- 
ination is essentially serious and, in her utmost blithesomeness, there 
is never a touch of levity. A funeral has its imaginative tokens, its 
symbols and vocal signs, its various externals very stimulating to a 


YALE LECTURES. 153 


perceiving and responsive person ; and it were long to tell (too long) 
into what realms of vastness and shadow these externals lead back ; 
—but quite as much into realms of illumination is he led back who 
has the faculty to be led, when standing by the dead and among 
the sorrowful; and an unimaginative mind proclaims itself by an 
excessive and monotonous lugubriousness in these scenes of lam- 
entation, as often as in any other way. A funeral occasion has in 
it certain elements, or contents, mixed contents, as I have said ; 
and the secret of ceremonial fulness, propriety, flow, and satisfying 
completeness all around, is just to get at, grasp, and master, those 
elements. In full possession of those data, in conscious and 
emotional possession of them, you are released from the bondage of 
fear, fear of man, fear that you will hurt some bleeding heart, fear 
that you will make some infelicitous allusion, fear that some word 
will fall from you that is not in absolute taste, fear that you will 
express yourself more joyfully than you ought, in view of the fact 
that several persons just about you are not joyful at all ;—and when 
you come to read your suitable Scriptures, you interpret them in 
your reading according to their greatness; by your cadence, your 
in and out of inflection, the tranquil warmth and fulness of your 
tone, or perchance by your march of energy—by all those subtle 
tokens whereby the human mind declares its thoughts and emo- 
tions, with their innumerable shadings and vicissitudes. 

What I have said of weddings and funerals, applies to all cere- 
monies. ‘Their true impressiveness is violated if you do not use 
them in an ideal way. ‘The Protestant Episcopal service begins :— 
“ Dearly beloved ’””—what! all those undeveloped and miserably 
flawed and often personally disagreeable saints out there in the 
assembly, dearly beloved! How can the man say that! Some of 
them are dearly beloved, easily enough. Anybody can see that. 
But the rest of them, scattered about! How can he? 

That is good reasoning, is it not? I used to deal with that 
affectionate expression in that way, and many do. But now I can 
say ;—dearly beloved, to.all church people and to all mankind, and . 
it does not wrench my sincere conscience, at all. I like to say it. 
When I say, dearly beloved, I address the Church ideal—I speak to 
those imperfect people as potentially and prophetically perfect, and 
perfectly lovable, by the inworking, sure grace of God. I imagi- 
natively impute to them the excellence of their coming better day. 
I see them in Christ Jesus just as their God does. I address Him 


154 . YALE LECTURES. 


in them. I do it not by a sophistication of my own faculties. 
Imputation is not sophistication, but a four-square reality, a reality 
of the imagination, a valid, instinctive, and inevitable movement of 
feeling. 

And Christian worship is full of these imaginings ;—these 
glorious and glorifying imaginings. All men are dearly beloved on 
the same principle. Jesus bore them all in his own body on the 
tree, and they are redeemed,—and, seeing them as redeemed, I can- 
not avoid a warmth towards them. It is his warmth reproduced in 
me and mine is as valid and rational as his. Jesus loves them with 
a love of pity because they are so imperfect—that is so—but he 
loves them with a love of admiration also, looking forward to the 
beauty of holiness to which they may come, by force of redemp- 
tion and redeeming grace. I might show you this same instinctive 
play of ideality, here and there, through the whole liturgy. The 
service corruscates with it. And it is the one thing that sustains 
ceremonial, and makes it other than a hollow thing. When Richard 
Cobden died, the Earl of Beaconsfield, in the English House of 
Commons, delivered a memorial eulogy on him—which I read with 
admiration. It was only a few minutes long, but it rose to the 
occasion as no other speech on Cobden then and there did. John 
Bright tried, but his grief broke him down. Beaconsfield saw Cob- 
den in his whole magnitude and in his whole remarkable quality, 
and he saw Cobden’s industrious, manly, and fruitful life ; he saw 
mourning England ; he saw the great, sad, irreparable vacancy in 
the world made by that death ; and in masterly vision and compre- 
hension, of all the several realities of the occasion, he spoke ; and 
the utterance was adequate and memorable. 

There are many things that we call occasions. The assembly 
in our National House of Representatives, in memory of President 
Garfield, when Mr. Blaine spoke so well, was one. When Wash- 
ington bade Congress farewell and surrendered his sword, there was 
another. When Luther met the Diet at Worms, when England tried 
Warren Hastings, when Lincoln spoke on the field of Gettysburg, 
when Chalmers and his friends left the General Assembly of Scot- 
land, when Frederick Robertson looked down from the gallery o 
the theatre at Oxford and saw William Wordsworth come in to 
receive an honorary degree in a tumult of the multitude that almost 
shook the Island: these were occasions, and all of us are likely to 
be overtaken by such, and possibly pushed into the forefront of 


YALE LECTURES. 155 


them, as their orator or their master of ceremonies. And what I 
say is, that some men are good for an occasion, and some are not ; 
—those that are being made so (other things being equal), by 
their large-minded, high-minded, fine-minded, hundred-eyed, intui- 
tive, ideal, imaginative comprehension of the exact facts of the 
moment. And religious ceremonies are no otherwise than secular 
ceremonies, in this regard. A minister at the sacred table needs 
just Beaconsfield’s ability to enter into the situation. Some men 
will dedicate a church in a manner to change your feeling towards 
that building forever ;—or they will excommunicate a church mem- 
ber with a similar impressive ceremoniousness—or they will receive 
a deputation or address an outgoing regiment in the name of God ; 
or ordain a deacon ; or consecrate a field of graves, or welcome a 
world’s Evangelical Alliance, or voice the good-by of a great con- 
gregation looking for the last time on some trans-Atlantic visitor— 
as when Bishop Simpson, in the name of American Methodism 
in New York assembled, poured out a valedictory on Dean Stanley 
—it does not make much difference what they are called to (these 
ceremonial men) ; they know how to distil into their speech the 
entire spirit of the hour, with its multiplied circumstances ;—they 
may be very simple, they may be robed in no official dress, whether 
lawn, powdered wig, cocked hat, or priestly stole, they may read 
out of no book, but out of their mind only; they may eschew 
sounding titles and all pomps of conventionality. Nevertheless 
they have great effect on all witnesses, as having visibly gathered up 
into their minds whatever goes to make the occasion ;—gathered it 
up for their own enlargement at the moment and their aggrandize- 
ment of feeling, and for the ennoblement of their diction. 

Great is this gift in the house of God. Happyis the man who 
always sees and feels the import of a. Christian service. Blessed 
is he who cannot be staled by routine ;—who feels the pathos of his 
last baptism as much as he felt the pathos of his first—and more— 
who never goes to a burial but the whole burden of it and the 
whole consolation are on him; who officiates at the Lord’s Supper 
for the ten hundredth time with the tides of Calvary in undiminished 
flow about him; who lifts all ceremony into the ideal—who takes 
whatsoever of noble architecture, or noble music, or pictorial 
beauty, may happen to surround him in his service, and weaves it 
into the texture of his feeling, as harmonious with his soul’s holiest 
experiences and indeed serviceable thereto ; while he moves before 

13 


156 YALE LECTURES. 


his people, and with his people, in the endless rounds of his office ; 
simulating in little and so far as he may that other and perfect 
worship, into which all our ceremonies shall merge at last. 


HAE RIGHT CONDUCT :OF 
PUBLIC WORSHIP. 


My Brethren, I am here to-day to address you on a theme 
which you have heard discussed before, with more or less fulness, I 
suppose. Nevertheless, I speak right on, as knowing that the multi- 
plication of witnesses on any given point of truth may be a service- 
able thing, especially if the witnesses have had a good deal of 
experience of that whereof they affirm, and out of their experience 
have managed to thoroughly make up their minds. 

You will observe as I pass forward, that I understand myself to 
be addressing a body of young men, the larger number of whom by 
far are expecting to take service in non-liturgical churches, churches 
of the sort with which I myself have been connected all my days ; 
though let me say, I shall distinctly avoid any special comparison 
between the worship of our churches and that of the more liturgical 
and ritualistic bodies. I have almost any amount of fellowship with 
them and could discuss their ways with entire candor and geniality, 
I fancy; however, I do not feel myself called to that on this 
occasion. 

When we speak of Public Worship, we mean often the entire 
service of the Sanctuary; but I shall use the word a little more | 
strictly to-day, and shall exclude the sermon, as not in exact defini- 
tion, worship. ‘The sermon is a subject by itself, and a large one 
too. And first, let me consider the prayers, of which in our usage, 
there are three ;—the invocation, the central and main prayer (often 
described with fearful truth, as the long prayer,) and the closing one. 
And concerning these three, I remark to begin with: That they 
should be kept distinct—absolutely so, as a rule—in the minister’s 


158 : YALE LECTURES. 


theory of them and in his practice; and that for several reasons. 
First, in the structure and philosophy of our service they do cover 
different fields. They are not intended to lap each other, much less 
to be mixed together in a total chaos; the long prayer being the 
invocation over again, for the reason that the invocation swept the 
entire possible range of prayer; and the closing prayer being a 
reproduction of both, only with a certain necessary brevity. That 
is not the theory of our worship, I say; but the invocation is pre- 
cisely what its name implies, a calling down of God’s blessing on 
what is to follow, and stands at the beginning, as having an express 
function right there ; and in strictness (by the way,) should not be 
preceded by any other act, whether of the minister, the choir, or the 
congregation. So with the rest of the prayers. They have each a 
well-defined and characteristic use in the organism of our worship ; 
and should be kept to that use. Now this rule is violated very often. 
At a funeral not long ago, in a family of which I am the pastor, a 
brother clergyman was requested to commence the service with an 
invocation and reading of the Scriptures ; leaving to me (as was 
suitable) the Pastoral Prayer, the only remaining act of the occasion. 
And he started. And his prayer was at least ten minutes long, 
marching out with a leisurely fulness into all the mentionable circum- 
stances of the case, including an express notice of each person or 
class of the near kinsmen of the deceased, together with such general 
reflections as I myself had hoped to make, but was now in common 
decency cut off from. As I am gifted with a certain amount of 
faculty for amplification on a small stock of material, I did not feel 
myself utterly bankrupted by this raid into my territories ; but I did 
feel that that blessed brother did not sense the natural proportions 
and eternal harmonies and boundary-lines of things ; especially as on 
reaching the grave, and being invited by me to offer a short prayer, 
he once more mentioned all the relatives, separately, and otherwise 
conformed himself to the dimensions of the broad landscape and the 
infinite open air in the midst of which we stood. 

Now such practices as that are exceedingly wearisome and 
unjustifiable. All persons who have a sharp discernment of what is 
suitable are offended by them, as well as tired out ; while the undis- 
cerning feel a staleness creeping over them, though knowing not 
what it means. Often they attribute it to their depraved lack of 
interest in religion. But it is not that ! 

And, speaking of weariness, under a repetitious presentation of 


YALE LECTURES. 159 


the same thing, I am reminded that some seem to think that a ser- 
vice lacks full unity and a truly deep impression, unless the key-note 
of it be thoroughly sounded in the first utterance of the minister, 
(the invocation) and be kept sounding all through to the final amen. 
The first hymn must sound it—and all the hymns. The Scriptural 
lessons must be selected to carry it on. And each succeeding 
prayer must be full of its flavors. I was present at the administra- 
tion of the Lord’s Supper one day, and although the first hour was 
to be spent in prayers, hymns, and sermonizings, prefatory to the 
Supper, yet the invocation of the minister took us immediately into 
the heavy stress of the table, in an. extended, wrestling, deep-toned 
way ; and as completely as though we had already arrived at the 
table itself; so completely in fact that in the nature of the human 
mind, we, the congregation, could not make any advance thereafter 
in our feeling, and hardly in our thought. We had struck twelve 
(all the sensitive ones of us had) and thenceforth we dwindled, or 
at best, merely held our own ;—for every act of the entire hour was 
made by the minister to have that same central emphasis ; an em- 
phasis which could be endured only about so long, I repeat; the 
constitution of man being so made that, with a fine instinct of self- 
preservation, it unloads impression when it has enough of it, and 
subsides into a wholesome indifferency. Now I maintain, that that 
brother was wrong in thus starting his journey at his highest speed. 
I do not like to use the word Art, in connection with the ordering 
of divine service, as I have said to you several times before, but 
there are laws of art which must be observed, if the service is not to 
be made more or less a failure. For example, if that leader of our 
worship on the day I mention, had made his invocation simply invo- 
catory of God’s blessing on that assembly in their approaching 
various acts ; and if the hymn that followed had had no respect to 
the Holy Supper, but had spread itself in general praise, or had 
celebrated the Sunday as the day of the resurrection of our Lord; 
and if the Biblical Lesson that then came on had been selected, not 
from the intense Scriptures of sacrifice, (the Scriptures that are so 
full of the mediatorial travail of the Son of God,) but from more 
general passages, leaving those more particular texts to be used at 
the moment of approach to the Supper; in short, if our leader had 
even for the whole hour held us a little off from the precious crisis 
of the occasion, in various preamblings, all within the lines of 
Christianity of course—yes, and more than that within the lines of 


160 | YALE LECTURES. 


interior and central Christianity, so that we might be in a process of 
real preparation for the feast ; then two fundamental things would 
have been effectually secured. First, that underflowing unity which 
is SO precious in any service, and which he was after so earnestly ; 
and secondly, that unwasted vigor, that full and fresh play of faculty, 
on the part of the congregation, which makes the Lord’s Supper a 
heart-filling and strengthening observance. 

Perhaps some of you, My Brethren, will doubt my statement 
that unity in a service is secured by preamblings that do not come 
right to the main point. Well, look at the great Historical Liturgies 
and see how they are constructed. ‘This notion of so many that the 
sermon is the great feature of the hour, and that all things before and 
after must chime about that, and from that get their color and tone, 
is not provided for in the Liturgies; for they move on in their 
diverse exercises, in a free, multifold and unhindered way, as though 
real acts of worship, though they be of a general nature, were a good 
and sufficient preparation of the heart for listening to any sort of 
sermon that deserves to be preached. Take the Prayer Book of the 
Protestant Episcopal Church and observe how that undertakes to 
get its congregations on to the Lord’s Supper. Why, during the 
first hour, more or less, no one who was not informed beforehand, 
would surmise that the supper was coming at all ;—-and then, when 
it does come, the first stroke of the ritual is as far off as the reading 
of the ten commandments ; then comes a prayer, also far off; then 
the collect for the day, which may have'a special flavor of Christ’s 
Sacrifice or may not, just as it happens; then the Epistle and the 
Gospel for the day, (for the day you notice, and not for the sacra- 
mental occasion ;) then a Creed is read, a Creed suitable to any 
service of course; then, after a little, a most general prayer for 
the Christian church is offered ;—and finally, after all this, notes 
from the Holy table begin to break in. Now I do not stand 
here to eulogize these details and pronounce them perfect; but 
only to put forth the observation, that the great liturgical 
bodies of Christendom have practically expressed themselves to 
this effect; that, in order to have all the specific acts of a 
Christian service proceed upon a fundamental tone, and in that 
tone have their perfect unity, and therefore their utmost impression, 
it is not necessary that they should be so exceedingly particularized 
as my friend who led us in the Communion service that day particu- 
larized. And I have no doubt that this great consenting judgment is 


YALE LECTURES. 161 


right, and that any practice contrary to that. judgment is injurious. 

I may seem to you, to be spending a good deal of time on a 
minor point, just here ; but if I could run the subject out into all its 
relations, I might make it appear less minor than you think. If we 
submit ourselves to the perpetual drill of a routine which is unphil- 
osophically organized, we may save our souls, to be sure; but we 
shall be insensibly cheated out of some benefits which we might just 
as well have. Indeed I think there are forms of piety in the world 
partially disagreeable and unprofitable, which came to be so as de- 
veloped under this theory of concentration and particularization, 
whereon I have been remarking. Give us a broad, diversified 
rational service ; and not too much music on one string for the sake 
of impression. My remark sometime ago, that the three prayers in 
our service should be kept distinct, led me to speak of weariness of 
mind under them when they are all run together pretty much, and 
cover the ‘same ground ; and from that I was induced to spend a 
moment on the weariness and lack of impression of a service, which 
in its endeavor for unity makes its every act, beginning with the 
invocation, sound alike. 

And, now, still confining myself to the prayers, I would like to 
consider the “long prayer,’”’ and throw out some hints in regard to 
public prayer in general. 

And first, while you keep on calling the long prayer “long” if 
you want to, do you be very watchful that it never deserves that 
sonorous adjective. Soon after I commenced ministerial service, I 
was told of a neighboring brother who prayed fifteen, twenty and 
twenty-five minutes, almost any Sunday, and had been known to 
go as high as thirty-five, on a sufficiently august occasion. I, in my 
inexperience, lifted up my hands in amazement. I could not see 
what he could have to say to keep him so long, or how he ventured 
to call the congregation to an effort on their own part so extended. 
But in less than four years I was wiser; and found that I, myself, 
was almost equally affiuent, and was being timed by brethren who 
were not so devout but that they could look at their watches ; and 
not so awe-struck before the minister but that they could tell him 
of it. So I commenced to reform, supposing that all I had to do 
was to say the word to myself and the thing was done, but, behold ! 
the force of habit, and the force, too, of a deep interest, intellectual 
and other, in the mighty themes of prayer, and the mighty blessings 
which prayer goes out to seek ; I did not much reform. Good reso- 


162 | YALE LECTURES. 


lutions availed little. The moment I closed my eyes and began, 
time was cheap. However much it might be worth thinking of, as 
a matter of fact I did not think of it, or at least not enough to 
frighten myself and stop. ‘Then I undertook praying by the watch, 
putting it at my side, looking at it as I commenced, and looking at 
it again as I closed ; but in spite of everything, it registered usually 
fifteen minutes or more. After a sufficient trial of this, I made up 
my mind to deliberately omit numbers of things which really belong 
in any full prayer, for the sake of getting through. I would sacrifice 
my idea of prayer and work in only a fraction of its rightful con- 
tents, rather than destroy my prayer altogether as an exercise for 
the people, by making it burdensome ; just as a man loads so many 
thousand tuns into his ship instead of twice as many, because he 
judges it better to get across the ocean with three thousand than to 
sink with ten. But, strange to say at first, the two or three items 
of prayer to which I confined myself, under my handling, expanded 
to ten thousand tuns ;—the secret of that being (I suppose) that in 
my sense of having shortened down my circle of topics, I felt it safe 
to amplify each one a little more and in the bliss of that amplifi- 
cation took no measure of time. 

I must not be too long in giving you the details of this expe- 
rience, but it ended in my getting a phonographic reporter to plant 
himself in my gallery, and take down my prayerful utterances verba- 
tim, in order that I might see objectively what I had been about all 
those fifteen or twenty minutes. For on running them over in 
simple recollection, I could not understand by what meanderings 
or other leisurely works I had succeeded in being gone so long. 
This reporter brought me to my senses. ‘There was the whole thing 
in black and white, and I recognized the prints of my own feet, and 
the earmarks of my own diction, all the way. I was a convicted sinner, 
and I started out in a still more energetic repentance ; and I want 
to say for your encouragement, that in due time I brought myself 
within what I conceive to be proper limits in this very important 
part of public worship ;—so that, three or four years ago, when a 
certain gentleman, in my congregation, timed me on Sunday morn- 
ings for three months or more, it was found that ten minutes was 
my maximum swing. I confess though, with mortification, that I 
have not ability enough to condense into ten minutes, or less, all 
the particulars of a truly encyclopedic prayer—that is all that 
belongs in a “common” prayer (as our Protestant Episcopal 


YALE LECTURES. 163 


friends call it.) Neither do I consent to be confined to such brevity 
on all occasions ; but I make that general aim ; and I do not do it 
in mere cowardice before an impatient and unleisurely generation, 
who insist that everything shall be short, sharp and decisive, (a kind 
of touch-and-go-movement even in our holiest things, the newspaper 
article being the divine model for the minister ;) but I am con- 
strained to strive for a certain brevity, as convinced that the 
nineteenth century sincerely cannot pray more than ten minutes or 
so. It can keep its head down and be respectful twice that time ; 
but its mental exercise for the last half of the same it were unprofit- 
able to explore. 

Now, My Brethren, I bear down on this thing, and give you 
my experience and beseech you to be brief, because you are 
certainly on your way to have your feelings hurt unless you take 
counsel, and begin your career with a conscience in the matter of 
brevity. It seemed a sort of sacrilege to me when people began to 
animadvert on the length of my prayers ; but they kept on all the 
same, (never harshly though, in a single instance,) and by-and-by I 
went over to their side, and have had a comfortable amount of 
peace ever since. 

But I wish you to understand, I do not deliver this exhortation 
in behalf of brevity, because I am sympathetic with those people 
who would squeeze the worship of the church to death, in order 
that the sermon may have room to magnify itself almost without 
limit. We, on the one hand, and our liturgical brethren on the 
other, are still in the midst of the old debate, which shall be the hub 
of the wheel ; the worship or the sermon ; but we are not so far apart 
on it as we used to be; and the growing opinion among us now is, 
that while the sermon is not to be belittled, the worship is to be 
amply provided for, more amply in some respects than in the old 
times. And following in the line of this opinion, I insist that the 
sermon shall take heed unto itself, and call a halt (on all ordinary 
occasions) not very far beyond thirty minutes. Let it aim at thirty, 
and if, at the end, it finds:itself in a genuine gale, a true wind from 
Heaven, and cannot stop, why nobody will want it to. Let it sail 
on. But I notice that these heaven-born winds are generally 
willing to be reasonable and let a congregation off in about half 
an hour. 

In my efforts to shorten my sermons in order that worship may 
have fair scope, I have found it very serviceable to me, to keep 


164 i YALE LECTURES. 


betore my mind numbers of considerations like the following. 
First, that in the course of my ministrations year after year, it 
is not necessary that I should exhaust the subject I happen to be 
handling at any one time. If I have thoroughly studied it, I have 
discovered a good many important points in it; and partly because 
they are important and partly because I myself have discovered 
them and do therefore have the feelings of a mother towards 
them, it is a bitterness to me not to bring them all into my 
discourse. Moreover, it is an affliction to my taste, as an 
intellectual man, to make only half a statement of a subject; 
like a snatch of music from a grand oratorio. But I remember that 
I am a settled pastor, and (God willing) am to have other chances 
at that same subject, so that in the course of time I can get my 
whole oratorio moving, and give my congregation the advantage of 
it ;—a mutilated advantage you may be inclined to say, because they 
have not taken it in all at once ; and yet not very mutilated I fancy. 
For not half of them are disciplined sufficiently to take anything in 
its entirety at one effort. And in the next place, while I may be 
painfully conscious of omissions in my treatment of my subject 
because I have carefully looked it all through, they (as not having 
done that) do not feel any omissions. It sounds to them like 
the whole oratorio. In the Easter Service in my church last Sunday 
morning, my sermon had five heads; but the choir and I had done 
so many things, and had been so long about it, that I was compelled 
to omit the first four. Nevertheless that fifth head I found had 
marched out into the air as though all the preceeding four were 
sounding therein. Nobody seemed able to imagine that anything 
had been left out. I presume there were reverberations of those 
departed and invisible four heads running through that fifth one, 
because I wrote the fifth as energized and fructified by my pre- 
ceding converse with the four ;—and that is true of all our sermon- 
izings. We make a full study of a theme, and then deliver only half 
our thoughts on it, or less; but in that half, our entire prepara- 
tion resounds. Three years ago, at the installation of a pastor, I 
heard one of my brethren deliver an extended charge to the people, 
and the other evening, at another installation, I heard him deliver 
it again. But as he was crowded into a late hour by me and others 
who had preceded him, he was compelled to abbreviate his deliver- 
ance ; badly, he thought ; and he told me beforehand that he felt 
unhappy. He shortened it fully one half I should say. But I did, 


YALE LECTURES. 165 


not miss anything. And I venture to say, nobody in that house 
missed anything—excepting always himself. He did not give us 
the whole loaf; only a slice ; and of course, such a proceeding as 
that is grievous to the feelings of a generous man. He felt mean, 
but the fact was, the whole taste of his loaf was in that slice. 
His entire mind was in it, his spirit, his magnetism, his love of God 
and man, his whole feeling about the relations of a people to their 
pastor. So, friends and fellow-brethren, whenever I feel that I have 
done injustice to a subject and perhaps bereaved my people, by a 
partial presentation of it, I recover myself by reflecting that I am to 
have other opportunities to preach on it, most likely; and that 
meanwhile in what limited bread I have distributed, there is the 
identical smack of the loaf. : 

And that reminds me to say, that it greatly assists us to brevity 
in sermonizing, to omit all those preliminary skirmishings about our 
subject, (like General McClellan’s famous earth-works creeping 
slowly up the Yorktown peninsula towards Richmond, in the days 
of our war ;) to omit all these skirmishings, I say, which have not 
in them the real heart-beat and quintessence of the subject, and are 
only like the dry burr on a nut; to omit them, and make a straight 
march for the center, and give the people the very relish of the 
thing in the first sentence if possible. That saves a great deal of 
time and does no damage either. 

Another thought wherewith I have comforted myself in my 
efforts to be brief is, that my people neither require nor need that 
I should consume much time in giving them the processes of my 
thought, the steps by which I arrive at results, What they most 
need are results ; assertions from a man who has looked the case 
up and knows what he is saying. I am making haste along here, 
and cannot expound this idea as I would like, and put in suitable 
qualifications ; but I look back and sce that in the first years of my 
sermonizing (to say nothing of later days,) I wasted a good deal 
of my time in the pulpit, and a good deal of the time of the people, 
in mapping before them minutely the path of my own mind through _ 
the subjects. I made lengthy arguments in support sometimes 
of axioms and sometimes of truths, which, although not axioms 
exactly, yet, for all purposes practical and popular, are better argued 
by an outright statement glowing with the heat of personal ex- 
perience. There is that in the constitution of mankind which 
responds to the main affirmatives of the Christian religion. Say Sin, 


166 YALE LECTURES. 


and every human soul echoes your word. Say God, say Eternity, 
say Sorrow, say Jesus, and put it home with the weight of your per- 
sonal knowledge, and how can wire-drawn reasonings, and philoso- 
phizings and goings to Richmond by a circuit of half the continent, 
add anything to it. So much on keeping the sermon within pire 
dimensions with a view to give worship a large place. 

My second remark on prayers (whether long or short) is, that 
in them we should conceive God very distinctly, and make our 
whole movement out towards Him. I sometimes almost think it 
would be better to have before our eyes a visible representation of 
God in such form as reverent art has been able to devise ; and on 
that form, idealized and transfigured perhaps, by our holy imagina- 
tion, fix our eyes and there hold while we pray; this, rather than 
to be conscious chiefly of the congregation, and have half our 
prayer just a speech to them. A parishioner of mine in one of our 
conference meetings, went into such a deep and absorbed movement 
of prayer, that (for quite a space) he entirely forgot the rest of us 
all about him, and continually used language that implied that he 
was alone, as in the privacy of his room. That seems hardly the 
thing to do, but I submit, that ignoring the congregation in prayer 
is better than ignoring God, especially as prayer is ostensibly an 
address to God, and not an address to man at all. I think that 
God, from his stand-point in the Heavens, is more pleased with a 
man-ward lapse of memory than a God-ward ; and is more likely to 
grant a request that goes straight to'its mark in that concentrated 
and absorbed way. 

The advantages of a clear vision of God in prayer, and an 
absolutely resolved holding of the mind to Him, and never dropping 
to the assembly, are such as these. It lifts you above all human fright 
—which is apt to be rather severe sometimes in a’ young and inex- 
perienced man, especially if he be constitutionally timid. It pro- 
duces in you just that self-abasement which is not only suitable in 
prayer, but necessary if it is to be true prayer, and to bear in upon 
God’s mind effectually. It rules down your diction to a godly sim- 
plicity, saving you from oratory, and rhetorical vaporing, and all those 
posturings, and tones and tremendous originalizations, which are fitted 
to catch the ear of men but are most unseemly in anything that pro- 
fesses to be prayer; and which in addition to that, render it impos- 
sible for the congregation to follow you in any other way than they 
follow an oration. ‘They may be greatly entertained and greatly 


YALE LECTURES. 167 


stimulated, both intellectually and religiously, by prayers of the sort 
that I am criticising; but as for praying under such a lead, they 
cannot. Perhaps numbers of them will think they do, (not having 
analyzed the matter,) and perhaps whole congregations, under the 
pernicious education of a favorite minister, may come to feel that 
prayer is hardly worth listening to, unless it puts itself forth in fresh 
and ingenious expressions, in touches of fancy, in exuberant illustra- 
tions, and in re-statements of Christian Doctrine that are brand-new 
and unprecedented ; but their view is sufficiently shown up by ask- 
ing the one question: Are such outpourings fitting if conceived as 
actually addressed to God, and in so far as a praying man senses 
God, can he—in the nature of things, can he—use such devices of 
expression? No, he cannot. He will be burdened by the awful 
presence wherein he stands, and the solemn personal business that 
sends him into that presence, and his utterance will be simple, and 
lowly and not too profuse. 

I wish now to speak of a few things that tend to full, various, 
rich, easy, and right-flavored prayer, on the part of the minister 
leading his congregation. And first, I should advise much familiarity 
with the Catholic Liturgies ;—with the liturgies, I mean, of the Church 
general. I think it isa wholesome thing to read them and study them 
habitually, especially for a young minister, who, as being young, has 
not yet formed his habits. He need not go under any bondage to 
them. Heneed not publicly use theminform. If, at any point, they 
savor of doctrinal or ecclesiastical theories which he ought not to 
accept, very well, let him be on his guard against them. But let 
him read them, again and again; and catch their devout spirit and 
suffuse his mind with their seemly phraseologies ; and indoctrinate 
himself in the broad variety of their worshipful acts, and feed his 
religious imagination on their old-time precious associations, hearing 
in them, as he may, the voice of long-gone generations, the innu- 
merable millions of God. They will insensibly chasten his taste, 
mold his style, bring his extemporaneous doings into orderliness, 
abate his eccentricities, and make him a man whom it will be a 
means of grace to be led by in public worship. That will be their 
tendency at least, if they are used judiciously and with discrim- 
ination. 

Then again, I think that a minister would do well to consider 
his public prayers beforehand, if he would have them what they 
should be. If Iam asked: should he write them? I say no ;— 


168 YALE LECTURES. 


much less memorize them. On special occasions let a man do 
what seems to him best, and let the rest of us not pick at him much. 
But as a general rule, it seems to me decidedly, that the wisest 
way for us unliturgical ministers, is to premeditate our prayers, 
and prearrange them in their outlines and headlands; and leave 
all the rest to the moment. Prearrangement secures brevity. 
Prearrangement and premeditation secure thoughtfulness, and save 
us from the waft of accidental sidewinds as we go on in our prayer, 
(like unforeseen and unmanageable spurts of emotion, and sudden 
ideas which, as being sudden, fascinate us, and swing us off into 
digressions of whose meanderings and outcome nobody can be 
sure ;) and prearrangement also saves us from omissions that ought 
not to be made. The only danger in premeditation, that occurs to 
me now is, that it may destroy our spontaneity, and make us feel as 
though we were speaking a piece; or searching for our prayer in a 
corner of our pocket. Of course if our preparation is quite elabo- 
rate and formal, it tends strongly to that bondage ; a bondage which 
I should advise you never to submit to. Let your preparation be 
less formal. Do as I often do (if you cannot do any better) 
namely, digest the Scriptural lesson which you are going to read, 
until you are full of its vitality; and make your prayer start from 
that lesson and there have its roots. Somehow, I find there is a 
reality in that kind of start; my mind comforts itself in it, and 
seems to have a real business on hand ; and althcugh it might seem 
that your prayer, thus born, would have too much local color and 
not reach the full sweep of prayer; that is, not get in all its ele- 
ments, and all the proper details—as for example, if you root in 
some ringing imprecatory Psalm, how shall your prayer get over into 
Christianity and there expatiate as it ought—nevertheless, as a 
matter of fact, I never saw a Scripture yet that was not a good 
enough starting-point. The old Bible is full of one blood. Prick 
it anywhere and you have struck its inmost reservoirs of vitality. 
Or, if that figure be not quite accurate, then let me say, that a 
truly christianized mind turns everything that it touches into honey, 
and especially cannot fail while ranging the manifold clover-gardens 
of Holy Wnt. 

Again, much private prayer makes public prayer a veritable 
divine thing ; and a right thing everyway. I affirm unqualifiedly 
that a public praying that does not rest back on habitual prayer, is | 
always a less solid, deep-moving, fresh, diversified, effectual and 


YALE LECTURES. 169 


fructifying thing, than it ought to be. O! how important this is, 
and how I ought to dwell on its deep import ! 

Still again, pastoral visitation makes a good leader of worship. 
How can a man be self-conscious and formal, in his prayer, and 
full of flighty excursions of rhetoric, and an ear-catching minister 
everyway, when he knows by having been into the houses all about, 
that down in yonder seat before him is a mother in agony over her 
wayward son; and over there a person feeling his way along 
anxiously to the light; and yonder a family heart-stricken by 
bereavement ; and there a man so poor that he cannot sleep nights ; 
and beyond, another so spiritually insensible and lost that you do 
not know but he is lost forever ; and all about in front of you, men 
and women in full bloom for the heavenly life, whose faces are a 
benediction, and whose thanksgivings you want to voice in your 
prayer. The innumerable touch of human hearts makes a good 
prayer, I say. : 

Once more, a profoundly Scripturalized mind makes a good 
prayer. We cannot use liturgies much; therefore let us use the 
Bible ; memorize its passages, season ourselves with its doctrines, 
enrich ourselves with its imageries, read and study its wonderful 
histories, consort with its illustrious personages, live in its poetry, 
domesticate ourselves in its old Ritual, analyze its texts and single 
words, and find how vital they are to the last shred and atom, and 
how they magnetize and empower the mind ;—then shall our wor- 
ship move on, as in the most robust and historic of liturgies ;—our 
thought will be charged with the authentic flavors of God, and our 
language seem heaven-born sometimes ; for it shall go to the heart 
as being redolent of the one and only universal Book. 

Finally, and as underlying all the rest; all prayer has the 
privilege of being in the Holy Ghost; and is prayer in proportion 
only as it is thus originated and sustained. Many well-intentioned 
ministers do not seem to fully understand this. Theoretically they 
admit it, but in their practice they do not quite launch out into its 
mid-waters. Possibly rationalism has palsied them a little, (some 
of them) so that they are scarcely more than speculative super- 
naturalists. Possibly they are shy of letting into their life the full 
doctrine of the Holy Ghost, because they have seen instances of 
wildfire. Possibly, in some Communions, they have gone over to 
externalisms too much, making them the vehicles of God’s grace 
pre-eminently, and not so much dwelling on his direct and subjective 


170 YALE LECTURES. 


approach to the soul. Of course, all these classes of men have 
their plausibilities to present, and some truths ; and I should like to 
display their logic for them here to-day, and see what reply I could 
make. But, in lieu of that, I lift up the experience, the holy 
inspired experience of innumerable men, who have preached, and 
prayed, and led their assemblies many and many a time, and thou- 
sands of them habitually, in a fulness of the spirit of God which 
has carried them above the fear of man, as the stars range the sky, 
and has let them into great sweeps of liberty, and great visions of 
truth, and great confidences of faith, and great victories over the 
minds committed to their care. So that when a man has once entered 
into this experience, all rationalistic or other arguments designed to 
show that ministers had better be calm-minded, and careful, and 
reliant mainly on a plodding conscientious use of their own faculties, 
and their much learning, and their oratory, and their culture ; all 
that line of thought and talk, I say, rolls off froia him like pebbles 
from iron-clads. While a committee of the English Parliament 
were demonstrating to the world that steam roads were impossible, 
Stephenson was getting one ready, and running it. There was the 
argument on the one hand, and there was the road on the other. 
The argument was first-class, so good that I presume some of the 
committee stood by it till they died ; but the people who consented 
to try the road never cared much for that argument afterward. 
Experience is better than all the Parliamentary Committees on 
earth. 

And, My Young Brethren, I advise you to seek an experience 
of God’s supernatural and direct empowerment for your work, the 
moment you begin it ;—not a half-and-half experience, but one 
that shall go to the bottom of the subject and settle it in your mind 
for all time, and forever. 

I have now spoken to you of the prayers in public worship. 
The minister’s management of the other parts, as hymns and music, 
and choirs, and the use of the Scriptures, is a subject for another 
address. I presume you would all be glad to have me give you a 
recipe for managing choirs. And, on the other hand, your choirs 
would like to get from me a recipe for managing you. I do not 
know but I should be a good enough man for advising you, because in 
twenty-eight years of service I have never had a single quarrel with 
achoir. I do not think a minister needs to be a technical musi- 
cian in order to stand supreme over the worship of song in his 


YALE LECTURES. 171 


church. If he is thoroughly grounded in the eternal principles of 
worship (as very man may be, and should be), and continually shows 
it by his manner of conducting the worship, on occasions both 
ordinary and special, and by his wise discussions of the subject 
from time to time; then his weight with his people will be such 
that they will follow him and not the choir, in any question, or dif- 
ference, where fundamental principles and good taste are involved. 
Of course, if he is by nature an intermeddler and a picayune Pope, 
with no tact to deal with men, his choir will be likely to make him 
unhappy now and then ;. as will also his whole congregation for that 
matter. And probably they ought to. But if he bears rule in 
God’s house a little as a good mother does in her realm, that is 
with an affectionate firmness, and also with a timely blindness to 
numerous small irregularities which are only skin-deep, and are not 
worth calling a court-martial upon, he will be more likely to move 
on, and hold his seat in the saddle, forever. 

But I had better pass all this, and conclude with some running 
observations on the state of things liturgically in our churches, and 
the possibilities of improvement. Let me speak particularly of the 
Congregationalists. You will find, when you get among them, that 
they are resolutely attached to the old-fashioned ways, for sub- 
stance ; but you will also find, I am sure, that they are more and 
more ready to receive and incorporate into their worship, this, that, 
and the other excellence of other Communions. They do not 
believe in a priesthood, they are not very energetic sacramentarians, 
they honestly think that prayers read are not the most useful ; they 
are watchful against any such advance of rites and ceremonies as 
will make formalists of them, and undermine the old Protestant 
doctrine of Justification by faith; but there are numerous minor 
things (new things, for them) towards which they are beginning 
to be hospitable. The Cross, used as a symbol, does not much 
alarm them. They are importing into their music some of the 
old.standard riches and practices of the church at large. They 
are quite widely diversifying the ancient order of their service ; 
insomuch that now when I exchange pulpits with a Congrega- 
tional minister I always have to ask him what his particular 
practice is. Also, if a minister flushes up a little his ritual of 
the Lord’s Supper, with a view to have the externals of a thing 
so significant and so precious correspond more nearly with the 
thing itself, and more forcibly address the feeling of the congre- | 

14 


172 YALE LECTURES. 


gation ; they are likely to put up with it. I think there is a distinct 
advance among us on the doctrine of a real presence of Christ in 
the Supper; and that on that account it is feasible to introduce 
some expansion of ritual at the table, and some new emphasis. 
Whether these expansions are really profitable, I do not now dis- 
cuss. I only say they are practicable ; as has been already proved 
in numerous cases. Perhaps my own church is an extreme illus- 
tration of limberness in these matters (though I fancy there are 
many a good deal like it in our cities) ;—but in that church there 
are I do not know how many things done that did not use to be, 
and could not be. Not that I have labored with them very much, 
though I touch the matter now and then, but if an innovation 
seems to me really good, and not inconsistent with any essential 
feature of our Congregational system, I slip it in sparingly, on my 
own authority, and let it speak for itself. I am pretty careful to set 
on foot only what will speak for itself, in actual use. If you call a 
mass-meeting of your church to discuss whether the Apostles’ 
Creed shall be introduced in the congregation ever, or whether a 
book shall ever be used at the Communion table, or whether there 
shall be any back and forth of responses between the minister and 
the choir ; in every case some man will be found to object, and there 
you ate. But if you have their confidence to this extent that they 
will endure the first sensation of a new thing, put in on your own 
wisdom, and if it so happens that you have the wisdom to select 
the best things, and the easiest, and the most beautiful, and those 
most commended by long use in other branches of God’s church, 
and if you have the patience to hold back numbers of things that 
you think excellent, and not swamp the people by your inventions 
brought in flood-wise, then in course of time you may establish in 
your congregation almost anything that you desire ;—that is, unless 
you are out-and-out an uncongregational man—in which case you 
ought to leave the denomination. Some of you here present will 
never have any impulse to introduce deviations from the primitive 
way of our churches, but others of you will, just as sure as you live ; 
and our Congregational system is elastic enough to accommodate 
you, most likely. 

As an illustration, let me give you the order of the Easter ser- 
vices at my church last Sunday morning :—I do not consider it a 
triumph of holy art at all, for it is visibly unphilosophical at one or 
two points, on account of the stress of certain circumstances that 


YALE LECTURES. 173 


were upon me. It opened with introductory services by the minis- 
ter :—‘ How amiable are thy tabernacles,” and the like. Then fol- 
lowed the invocation. Then the Venite:—“O come let us sing 
unto the Lord,” the minister reading one verse, and the choir chant- 
ing the other. Then the first Scripture lesson, an account of the 
Resurrection of Christ, by St. John, followed by a corresponding 
anthem of the Resurrection. Then the second lesson (1st Cor., 
xv), followed by an anthem which amplified upon the theme of that 
incomparable chapter. Then half a dozen texts were read, in rela- 
tion to Christian faith, and confessing that faith, whereupon the 
choir intoned the Apostles’ Creed. Then I spent a few moments in 
what to me was a most sweet and holy commemoration of those 
who have departed in the faith of the Resurrection. I took the 
substance of it from the liturgy of the Catholic Apostolic Church 
years ago, adapting it to our needs. I have no time to repeat it, 
but it went on in this way :— | 

First, I read a Scriptural selection which began :— ‘I would 
not have you to be ignorant, brethren, concerning them which are 
asleep.”” Next, I made a general mention of the saintly dead, to 
which the choir responded in a solemn Amen. 

Next, I mentioned them in several classes, with a like choral 
response to each. Those classes were the Old Testament saints, 
and the immediate fore-runners of the Lord; the mother of the 
Lord, the Apostles, the Evangelists and Pastors, the martyrs and 
confessors, that succeeded j—and, finally, those of our own church 
who had left us during the year, their names being solemnly re- 
peated, and the choir following with these words :—‘‘ May they 
rest in thy peace, and awake to a joyful resurrection.” Then came 
a congregational hymn :—“ Let saints below in concert sing, with 
those to glory gone.”’ 

After that the service swung back into its general path again 
and there were prayer, responsive reading of the Psalter by the 
minister and the congregation, a Gloria Patri; a collection, with 
offertory sentences, (which sentences are sometimes delivered by 
the minister alone, and sometimes by the minister and choir in 
alternation), a hymn, a sermon only fifteen minutes long, because 
what went before had been uncommonly protracted, a hymn again, 
sung by the congregation, and then the benediction. 

Now every year, on special days, like Easter, and Christmas, 
and Thanksgiving, I have sent to me from Congregational pastors, 


174 . YALE LECTURES. 


and Presbyterians, and Baptists, printed special programmes, anala- 
gous to that which I have just recited in your hearing ;—which shows 
to me that there is at least a scattered liturgical movement among 
us (as you may call it). I have no idea that we are on the way to 
the introduction of a liturgy proper ; [there are profound reasons why 
that will never come to pass ;] but I am sure that within certain nor- 
mal limits our ancient service is to be diversified and enriched, the 
present individual instances of that being multiplied far and wide. 

Years and years ago I heard a Congregational pastor telling of 
a sermon which he had recently heard in New York, from a well- 
know Protestant Episcopalian, on the reasons for the exact order of 
the successive acts in the worship of that church. And this Congre- 
gationalist remarked with much contempt on the insignificancy of 
such a pulpit theme as that. He ridiculed such topics as “ debilita- 
ting topics.” That is what he called them. And I recollect that I 
at the time had a certain amount of sympathy with him in his view. 

By which circumstance I am reminded that some in this 
assembly may think that the present lecturer has spent a good deal 
of time to-day, and on points, some of which at least, are so sub- 
ordinate and minute, as to be open to that ridicule involved in that 
word, debilitating. Nevertheless, I stand fast in my conviction 
that so small a matter as the law of before and after in the ongo of 
public worship, the reason that one act comes here, another there 
and another there and not otherwise, is abundantly worth discours- 
ing upon, even as God discoursed to Moses on the precise details of 
the Jewish tabernacle and its worship ; and that our congregations 
cannot have the advantage of a full-toned cultus if the study of 
that subject is belittled. The masses of the people cannot be 
expected to be students of the subject. They sail round and 
round in the routine which is provided for them; thanking God 
and making no complaint so long as their prepossessions are not 
jostled, [and who can describe the endless riches of holy nurture 
which they receive] but we, the ministers, ought to be students of 
the subject, in order that our churches may be rationally defended 
against the enormous and increasing pressure of the great ritualis- 
tic bodies of Christendom (their doctrinal pressure and their liturgi- 
cal pressure), and at the same time may have the intelligence and 
the catholicity to receive from those bodies whatever contributions 
of thought or worship may profitably be incorporated into our 
system. 


LIBERTY OF THOUGHT WITHIN 
CONGREGATIONALISM. 


When I stood about where you do, my Brethren, I had an anx- 
iety like this : 

I began to study theology under the doctrinal prepossessions 
of my religious training, as we all do, and it seemed to me that 
candor required I should now disengage myself from those prepos- 
sessions, and address myself to all inquiries in that beautiful blank- 
ness and innocency of intellect in which our great original father, 
Adam, was, when he landed in this strange world. I had hitherto 
believed in a God, and did yet, but a knowing class of men had 
always contended that there is no such Being, so I must wrench 
myself if possible into a totally judicial position and throw upon my 
instructors the task of showing me, in my assumed ignorance, that 
there is a God. And the whole system of Christian truth must 
similarly validate itself before my unbiased mind. So, I came to 
this Seminary rather than to any other, in part, because I had an 
idea that Dr. Nathaniel Taylor here, took contracts of that sort 
and enjoyed them. 

I cannot conscientiously recommend to otties men this at- 
tempted philosophical impartiality of mine. It had its uses, but it 
had its mischief. We have no right to disavow our pious training . 
and our personal experience of God, even to the extent of tem- 
porary non-committalism ; neither do I believe it can be defended 
on philosophical grounds. 

_ However, I was in constant fear that I should somehow lose 
this philosophical balance of mine. Some teacher might get in on 
me with his seductions. Or some tenderness towards my father 


176 YALE LECTURES. 


and mother, now away from me, might undermine my thinking. 
Of course, as I went on, I accepted a goodly list of things as pro- 
ven; so that I was willing to undertake a Christian pastorate, and 
did ; but I knew several things even then whereon I doubted, or in 
which I did not believe in just that complete and enthusiastic way 
that I desired. So, now, my fear was that the position of a preacher 
and pastor, with its obligations to a pretty full orthodoxy, and its 
fine advantages of all sorts, which I certainly should not want to 
forfeit by any too great freedom and independence of inquiry, would 
incessantly and insidiously operate on me as a bribe to conformity, 
and make me non-judicial, thus vitiating all my thinking and disin- 
‘tegrating the foundations of my manhood. In fact, I sincerely 
thought myself in some peril at that point. And so my first years 
of service were years of self-watchfulness, and perhaps of inordi- 
nate self-assertion, as against this supposed liability to encroachment. 

Now I am going to speak to-day to that state of mind, think- 
ing it not unlikely to be here before me full-blown or in the bud. I 
shall say certain things which it would have done me good to hear 
in that early time from a man who had been in the world and 
among the churches long enough to discover how matters go on 
out there. I have been exposed to that tremendous danger for thirty 
years and I still live and I have never felt freer in my life, intellect- 
ually, than I do now. ‘That is the simple truth, my young friends ; 
and I will explain it to you. 

First, I found that our Congregational churches concede to 
their ministers—well, sometimes even an indefensible amount of 
liberty, as it would seem to me. I have preached everything that 
I wanted to; everything that seemed to me true and entitled to a 
place in the pulpit. No committee ever visited me to tame me 
down to their own views of things; or beg that I would reef in, 
in my speculations on the wide ocean of the doubtful or the un- 
knowable. I sailed to all points of the compass, and landed on all 
distant shores, wherever the excursive impulse took me and I seri- 
ously thought it my duty; only one man ever made a formal call 
upon me in the interest of more prudence. He was a good man, 
and particularly ignorant, and naturally circumscribed, and repre- 
senting nobody on earth but himself. He treated me well, and I 
treated him well and extracted profit from his talk and loved him 
till God took him. 

No doubt you must get into your teaching the substance ot 


YALE LECTURES. 177 


the Christian religion. You must show that you are not exploring 
to the ends of the earth under a sheer vagabond impulse, but in 
the interest of truth. You must concede to the people the same 
liberty that they concede to you, and not conceive of your pastor- 
ship as a lordship and practical right of tyranny. You must make 
it plain that you are after their welfare, whatever you say or do. 
Take heed unto these few, obvious things, and then no man in the 
world, who holds himself under any responsibility at all to other 
people, is freer than you are as a Congregational minister. That is 
my experience. 

Again, I have attended ecclesiastical councils these many years, 
as faithfully as any other man, and of the scores, young and old, 
whom I have seen appear before these bodies for ordination and 
for installation, I never knew but one to be rejected, and he lost his 
case because he had not character enough to carry him through. 
As a theologian he was a fair success and would have been set in 
office by a unanimous vote. Occasionally I have seen individual 
votes recorded in the negative, and in one instance the majority for 
the candidate was but one, while after the council was dissolved a 
stricter count seemed to show that the body did really divide 
exactly in the middle. But no matter, he went in. Also on the 
far horizon I have heard reverberations of negative majorities, as in 
this city within a year; and in other States over the hills and far 
away, but near enough to be suggestive ; still these adverse majori- 
ties are as exceptional as cyclones and earthquakes, and, unlike 
cyclones, they are often mitigated by facts like these :—the majority 
in the negative is small ;—or it is numerical and not moral; or the 
majority leaves on record so many cordialities towards the defeated 
man that he is almost more in honor than he would have been 
under the glorification of a major vote ; or the church which had 
sought him is so confident of its own right judgment on his merits, 
and is in such a state of Christian exasperation withal, that it pro- 
ceeds, right or wrong, to secure his services as though nothing had 
happened. It took us till midnight to reject that one minister 
whom I saw rejected, and he was backed by such a high-wrought 
multitude of free-born Congregationalists that all of us, members 
of the council, whose home was in other cities, took the earliest 
train next morning out of those parts—and then that multitude had 
an installation of their own ;—their deacons and other chief men 
took it in hand, and performed the necessary offices and duties at 


178 YALE LECTURES. 


the service ; and so the choice of that people was triumphantly ful- 
filled. Anda thoroughly foolish piece of business it was, as they 
themselves discovered at last. Congregationalism seems to have 
these little contrivances in the interest of liberty, or is made to 
have. In one case within my knowledge, a council pronounced 
against the installation of a man, on the ground of theological con- 
fusedness, and did it by a strong vote ; but the people immediately 
called another council, the old one and much more, and by that 
council the man was successfully brought to the haven where he 
would be. And the association of ministers to which I belong, 
licensed a young man (I think, unanimously) who had just been 
refused by another association for theological reasons. A discus- 
sion arose outside, on the comity of that proceeding, as there rea- 
sonably might, even as that second council which over-rode its pre- 
decessor was discussed, as it also reasonably might be, but no one 
was killed in either case, and the succeeding ministry of both of 
those men indicated that somehow, and sooner or later, they should 
have been put into service. In another case it might not happen 
so, but in this case it did. It is an entertaining sight, sometimes, 
to see the way men among us get their liberty. Congregationalism 
has some fine old expedients for heading off interlopers ; but it is 
not often that a good and substantially sound man of our order is 
really abused. 

If he is young, earnest, and interesting at all, most likely some 
old minister of renown and weight will have his bowels of compas- 
sion moved in his behalf, and will defend him, before the council 
and before the public. A candidate whom I wanted to vote against, 
and thought I might, had a hearty champion in Dr. Joel Hawes, a 
man of divinity, as careful and sound and respected as you could 
find. On another occasion, where I was present, an equally respec- 
table minister burst forth in indignation at what he considered the 
pettifogging and hectoring attempts of certain councilmen to reduce 
a young candidate to his ultimate atoms, and, perhaps, in the last 
analysis show him to be unsound. 

Gentlemen as you go out to your ministry and move along 
the years, if you are at all what you ought to be, you will find the 
country full of these natural defenders of you against any real 
wrong ;—sometimes they are men who have had to fight a fight 
themselves ; sometimes men who, although pretty full of theology 
are even more full of affection ; sometimes rational liberalists, and 


YALE LECTURES. 179 


again latitudinarians ; sometimes lowly, hard-working pastors whom 
the practical toils of life have taught that a large part of current 
theology is speculative, and not binding ; and again it will be some 
scholar who has not spent his life in parish service, but whose stu- 
dious investigations have taught him the same thing ;—and then, 
back of all individual defenders, stand ever the great generous 
masses of the Church, with their rough and ready judgments, their 
quick recognition of character, and stamina, and high motives, and 
their fine inflammability on occasion. 

I have no disposition to disparage the Congregational polity as 
a working system, but it has several excellent escapes for men who 
ought to escape. Some of these escapes were not intentionally 
provided by the generations who elaborated the system, but like 
seams in ships they open of themselves when the system falls into 
a rough sea of circumstances ;—open providentially, as some would 
say. Of course, reason declares that a ship like that must sink, 
but it is one of the features of this craft that it sails on, with an 
occasional open seam and parting of its timbers, about as well as 
any other—in practical safety, at all events. When a sociologist 
notices the thousands of incoherent and hap-hazard phenomena 
that emerge in human society, he might say that such a chaos and 
wide welter could work out no benefit whatever on the whole, and 
had better not be started at all ;—as, for example, how can there 
ever be any equilibrium of the sexes—numerical equilibrium—when 
each. birth, ini the sex of it, is such a pure fortuity ;—-nevertheless, 
behold ! somehow this infinite jumble of all kinds works along into 
eventualities most orderly and benignant—the sexes are counted 
off as though some mathematician had that interest in hand; and 
all other things are counted, measured, weighed, assorted, and 
manipulated with most excellent precision, as by a very discreet and 
million-handed somebody, ever at work just back of this visible, 
vast whirl, criss-cross, and heigh-ho of luck and disorder. Like- 
wise, Congregationalism seems to some critics and anxious specta- 
tors, to have infirmities enough in its constitution to make it a fail- 
ure the moment it is set running ; but just out of sight, somewhere, 
is a something or other that saves her. And I should like to give 
one lecture here on the prudential and conservative elements in 
Congregationalism. Again, within a few years it has come to be a 
fact that a majority of all our churches are served by men who 
were never put in their places by a council ;—another convenient 


180 YALE LECTURES. 


circumstance for those jealous for their own liberty of thought. 
Those of us who have been accustomed to the old way of councils 
of installation, dislike this new device, and think we can show why 
we dislike it ;—but here it is, beloved, and if any of you are con- 
cerned lest you be cramped in your freedom when you harness 
into our dear old system, there is a ray of light for you. No, you 
will not be cramped, any more than is good for you, and if you turn 
out a Methodist minister, you will not be. Please tell me how often 
there comes a trial for ministerial free-thinking in the Methodist, 
or the Baptist, or the Protestant Episcopal persuasions? And it is 
not because those bodies are getting loose, either, but rather that 
their ministers are practically sound. If you are a Presbyterian, 
the grip on you may be a little more strangling and dangerous, but 
if you find yourself coming to your last breath in that body, here 
outside are these other communions, with wide-open breathing for 
all the Presbyterians on earth, if only they will appreciate their 
opportunities and come over. 

I have treated this subject of freedom in the Congregational 
Communion in a care-free spirit and without melancholy, as you 
have noticed, because I am convinced of two cheerful things ; first, 
that the schemes of prudence and reaction, which have been organ- 
ized of late against whatever excessive freedom there may be 
among us, will not be permitted to endanger our liberties. This 
reaction may go to excess, it may billow and career, and toss up its 
foam ; it may raise a feeling within itself, that it is about to deluge 
the planet ; but there is in Congregationalism a rock-bound coast of 
Individualism, and local Church-Independency, on which these 
towering reactions are sure to dash and shatter when they get far 
enough. 

Secondly, I am convinced that this shatter of the various con- 
trivances of prudence and conservatism, will not end in license 
under the name of liberty. There will be scattered cases of top- 
heaviness, and vaporing and heresy, among our ministers—and 
among all ministers ;—but the bulk and body of us will retain our 
substantial sanity and our wholesome effect on the children of 
men. Taking us all together, we are a hard ship to wreck, as I said 
before. 

So much have I put forth as fitted to soothe a young minister 
alarmed as to his liberty and as to the possible loss of his judicial 
temper ;——as I used to be. The churches will not oppress him. 


YALE LECTURES. 18] 


Another thing I discovered, which tended to bring ease to my 
mind in regard to my doubts and my possible inability to be en- 
tirely conformed to what might be required of me, and in regard to 
my general peace in life, was that a thoroughly profound and satis- 
factory religious experience may be had by a man who is a good 
deal inexact in his philosophical religious thinking. For instance, 
it used to be thought that the sacrifice of Christ was a ransom paid 
to the Devil, who had us all. That was doctrine good enough in 
evangelical circles once, and the piety of pious men nourished itself 
on that view. It has been taught, in the same circles, that Christ 
in His passion endured exactly what we sinners would have been 
compelled to endure had He not interfered. It has been taught, 
too, by evangelical teachers, that while He did not endure the same 
that we must have done, He did endure the equivalent thereof. And 
soon. I need not mention all the fine thinking that has centered 
on that adorable mystery, the mediation of the Son of God. But 
under all these evangelical theories, human souls have had great 
gladness, great tenderness, great liberty and vigor and growth in all 
directions ;—and they have had this because those different hypoth- 
eses have all abundantly magnified the Redeemer and his work ; 
and in magnifying Him, have magnified by inevitable implication 
all the essentials of the Christian theology. As respects the mere 
matter of gratitude to Jesus Christ, with all of piety and salvation 
that that involves, either one of several evangelical modes of con- 
ceiving his sacrifice is as good as any other of the several. So 
then, we have great freedom in our philosophy of the Atonement. 
We are not compelled to settle it. We would like it settled, but we 
can live, and live to all eternity blessed for evermore, if it is not 
settled. 

And the same is true of some other doctrines. There is a 
great struggle to get an infallible Bible. And there is a special 
anxiety at present concerning the final state of obstinate sinners. 
If it is not one thing we are wresthng on, it is another, and this 
never-ceasing human endeavor is full of uses ; but the substance ot 
what the Infallibilist is after, is a Book that gives us—really gives 
us—God’s way of salvation for men ;—and that we have, whether 
Infallibilism and the Infallibilists are true or not. There are sev- 
eral views of that Book besides his, several more or less important 
variations from his view, that are conservative of all necessary doc- 
trine and conservative of all the main interests of the Kingdom of 


* 


182 YALE LECTURES. 


God. And as regards the eternal doom of sinners, what we want 
is a view that does not diminish penalty beyond its maximum im- 
pression on men, and that is secured alike by several minor varia- 
tions of doctrine. 

I have struck a precarious line of thought here and ought to 
pursue it something farther, if I am to do it justice and make all 
snug and safe ;—but it must answer to say, as I have, that you pro- 
vide for your release from a great deal of bondage when you dis- 
cover the distinction between the substance of a doctrine, the thing 
therein that makes it valuable, and the philosophical formulation in 
which it happens to put itself forth for to-day. In the proposition 
God ts light, it so happens that the three words are English. They 
might have been Spanish, or German, or Arabic, and they were 
Greek ; but who cares for the particular language in which they 
stand, if only in every language we get the fact back there in the 
nature of God, that He is Light, and in him is no darkness at all. 
So, the substance of the Atonement is that Jesus Christ somehow 
removed all difficulties whatever they were, on all sides, to our eter- 
nal and complete salvation ; and these refinings as to a ransom paid 
to Satan and so on, are but the ruan-made Greek, Spanish, and 
English, in which that glorious Fact, or Substance, is costumed. 
This Substance is binding on us and to fly from it is heresy and 
spiritual death, very likely; but the terminology is not binding. 
Voice the Atonement, O man, in the philosophical tongue that suits 
you, and let no one abridge your liberty there. 

A third discovery. I found that whereinsoever I was uncer- 
tain, doctrinally uncertain that is, as to the philosophy of doc- 
trine, I might keep still about it ; still before my people, still before 
my brother ministers; except here and there a chosen soul, still 
everywhere and all the time. A young man is not apt to know 
that silence is very often his privilege. He cannot see why such a 
proceeding is not deception and duplicity. He wants his flag 
afloat in the upper air and not hidden in the darkness of his 
pocket. But may not men and ministers have some privacies? 
This spirit of outrightness is beautiful and let us keep full of it so 
long as we live; especially let preachers be brave and transparent, 
and let their congregations have the unconfusedness and comfort of 
feeling that they are so; but we must have our outrightness confine 
itself to matters on which we have something to affirm. Now if a 
man has gone so far as to educate himself in theology, and put him- 


YALE LECTURES: 183 


self in some pulpit to preach; presumably he has a list of things 
whereon he has got his foot firm down, so that he wants to preach 
them. It may be a small list, but it is sufficient to make him an 
affirmative man, and sound affirmative when he speaks, provided he, 
in his preaching, just keep within that list of beliefs. I agree with 
the frequent remark, that a preacher must not be a negative, nor 
even an agnostic ;—his general tone must be declarative and un- 
qualified, rather than hesitating, or even deliberative ;—but a young 
man has not ripened to unqualifiedness on all points that ever occu- 
pied the human mind. He has not had time to think himself out 
into the largeness of the universe ; neither has he yet found his way 
into all godly experiences. Still, it is time for him to begin to 
preach. He cannot wait till he reaches full stature and is sixty or 
seventy years old. Moreover, the churches do not want him to wait. 
They like him while yet downy and callow and chirping. 

But even now he has learned a few things. . He has learned 
the doctrine of depravity and the helplessness of man; ‘his own 
heart has taught him that. And he has learned that there is a 
Redeemer. Out of his studies and out of his experience he has 
settled that. He has learned that there is a Hell and a Heaven; 
he has been in them both. He has no doubt that God is, and 
holds men responsible. He believes the Bible a divine Book. He 
has found it so. He has looked out on the world and noticed that 
the Chnistian religion has force among men. He sees that the men 
of God must be organized in the Holy Ghost for God’s work. He 
has had his communions with God. There are a score of points 
on which he is solid, and in some of them he is enthusiastic. Well, 
let him preach them. If he knew ten times as much as he does 
and had ten scores of points, instead of one, the one score that he 
now has would be the ones he ought to preach nearly all the time. 
The most mature affirmative theologian gets his affirmativeness from 
these very truths that this young man has already grasped ;—be- 
cause they are the chief truths, they are the Christianity of Chris- 
tianity ; they are the working forces of the Gospel. If only a man 
is full of the idea that Christianity is a supernatural religion—that 
alone, it carries enough in it to make him a powerful preacher ;— 
a man of faiths, and not an Agnostic, mooning forever in the vast- 
ness of his own dubiousness ;—a man in contact with whom other 
men are stimulated and helped in all the confusion and weariness 
of life, yea, helped on their way into the final glory of God. Why 


184 YALE LECTURES. 


consume Sunday time in opening your unsettled questions, when 
you have pulpit topics already more than you can ever get through ; 
——and those the essential topics, too? Why is it a part of manli- 
ness to proclaim your unconcluded thinkings on matters which it 
would not be supremely important to proclaim if they were con- 
cluded? Keep still, I say again. Have sense. An English gen- 
tleman traveling in this country for the first time, accompanying 
Dean Stanley, had spent his first Sunday in Boston, and had lis- 
tened to one of our eminent preachers there, a man of several very 
mentionable gifts ; but what most impressed the Englishman, as he 
said, was that man’s good sense. “ After all,’”’ said he to me, “ after 
all, the greatest quality in a minister is good sense.” Possibly that 
has been said before by somebody, somewhere ; it rather sounds so, 
and yet it seems fresh, somehow. Have sense. I wish it did not 
take half a lifetime to get it. 

A fourth important discovery that I made, and made a matter 
of ease to my mind, was with regard to creeds. I feared I might 
not be able to accept them sufficiently, and might be uncomforta- 
bly pressed towards acceptances from which I reluctated, as I have 
already said. My church might press me. ‘My denomination 
might press me. The importance of preserving my influence for 
good might lead me to Creed subscriptions that I was not up to 
with all my faculties. But when I came to see what sort of a thing 
a Creed is, in some respects, then I could sign an ample variety of 
them. A Creed is a storm-born: child generally, and there are 
storm marks on it. If it had been born in pleasant weather ;—in. 
the deliberativeness, meditativeness, and tranquil undebative tem- 
per of peaceful sunshine, it would have been a spherical affair ; 
whereas, it is hemispherical, one-sided, a partial utterance. Whena 
man says to me, good morning, and I reply, good morning, sir, that 
expression of mine is not the whole of truth, by any means. It 
was a reply, and was narrowly limited by that fact. So a Creed, the 
Nicene for example, a most noble and much-used symbol; but 
mark the thunder-stroke movement of its Trinitarian clauses :—“ I 
believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son of God, 
begotten of his Father before all worlds, God of God, Light of 
Light, very God of very God, Begotten not made, Being of one 
substance with the Father.’’ I do not know that any human com- 
position does me more good to articulate; but no breath of man 
ever shaped itself into just such a shape as that, except as divinely 


YALE LECTURES. 185 


stirred up by some denial, as the Nicene fathers in fact. were. 
After this burst of polemical energy, the Creed swings into the 
broad Catholic movement of the Apostles’ Creed, in the main, the 
only Creed I recall at this moment which does not lie open to my 
remark as to their polemical origin, and their resultant partialism. 
That has the true earmarks of Catholicity, and is therefore good to 
use under all circumstances and in all ages. 

I have lying open before me, as I write, the Creed of the Theo- 
logical Institute of Connecticut; which I mention with entire 
respect and simply for illustration’s sake. It is a Creed which I 
could myself sign, as all members of the Connecticut Pastoral 
Union have, though I never did sign it. But if I did, I should do 
it in distinct remembrance that the document was originally a pro- 
test against certain phases of doctrine which it was supposed might 
get headway in the Congregational body in this State; and that, 
starting in such a motherhood, it must be a decent child and show 
its mothering, as it honestly does ; so that it has nothing near the 
breadth of the two Creeds to which I have already referred. Of 
course every subscriber to that Creed, when he gets his name writ- 
ten, in the secret places of his own mind adds numbers of things ; 
antithetic truths, qualifiers and wholesome expositions of the docu- 
ment, thus making another Creed, as long as the one he has signed, 
until he gets himself into the wholeness of Christian doctrine after 
all, into the sea, instead of being detained in a puddle. And that 
is my point; that Creeds must be signed in that way—not with 
mental reservations, I do not mean that, but with mental additions, 
ordinarily, that all Christian people could assent to. I will illustrate. 
The article in this Creed, that describes God’s election, runs on in 
this familiar and innocent manner :—‘ God, from eternity, elected 
some of our fallen race to everlasting life, through sanctification of 
the Spirit, and belief of the truth, not for any foreseen faith or obe- 
dience in the subjects of election, but according to his own good 
pleasure.” According to his own good pleasure! Now when I say 
amen to that, I interpolate. a cogitation of my own, to the effect that 
God is a supremely good, reasonable Being, full of love, and finds 
his pleasure in going by the constraint of sweet and loving reasons 
always. And that is exactly why his “ pleasure’ in election—as the 
Creed calls it—is a good pleasure. Behold! what a flood of the 
milk of Heaven’s kindness is carried into the interiors and very 
entrails of an Article on Election, by a little legitimate and friendly 


186 YALE LECTURES. 


amplification of the saying, “His pleasure.” The object of the 
makers of the Creed was to get men suitably humbled under the 
sovereignty of God in Election; but I have made an exegesis that 
also melts men; for a “ pleasure”’ so infinitely “good ” is enough 
to melt anything. 

Appending to the Creed a little meditation of my sort, a medi- 
tation which I should expect the authors of the Creed would them- 
selves approve, I manage to globe my conception of God in salva- 
tion, and save the formula of the Pastoral Union from doing me any 
hurt. If it had gone on and declared that many are elected to be 
lost, as numerous Creeds have declared, I should be willing to sign 
that, because it is so ;—in an awful rational sense, it is so—but I 
should have my private appendix to that ; namely, all lost men elect 
themselves to be lost. One is as true as the other, and no theodicy 
is entire without both ; so that self-election should stand in the fore- 
front of every Creed, as conspicuous, as loud-spoken, and fondly- 
spoken, as God’s election. 

You see my thought about Creeds now, and how I seem to 
myself to have a good deal of liberty in them—honorable liberty, I 
claim. If my Church has one that she would like subscribed by 
me, lam ready. If the Congregational National Council pleases 
to promulge some restatement of doctrine, by and by, I agree 
beforehand to give myname to it. They could invent something 
that I would not sign, but they will not. No Council, Synod, or 
General Convention, in these days, ‘that is, of the Evangelical type, 
would issue a Creed which a man might not sign, in the main at 
least ;—sign and accept in the real meaning of its words and even 
in the intended meaning generally. By the way, what is the differ- 
ence between real meaning and intended meaning? Is there any? 
If you subscribe to a Form, are you not honestly bound to sub- 
scribe according to the intention of the authors of it? Is not that 
its real meaning? I volunteer a small cogitation on that—since it 
seems to lie in my path through this subject—thus :— 

The authors of a doctrinal statement may have launched out 
in that statement into something considerably bigger and grander 
than they meant, or supposed at the time they had got. Blessed 
be God, men are liable to these unconscious expansions, when their 
souls are in great travail with a Creed. You see something analogous 
to that in the experiences of the Biblical prophets sometimes. 
They forged expressions intentionally local and narrow, but behold 


YALE LECTURES. 187 


those expressions are susceptible of universal uses, and the Spirit 
of God that presided over those prophesyings designed just that 
largeness. Or, take a modern illustration. Some strict, and pretty 
denominational Calvinistic theologian goes upon his knees for 
prayer. He isa godly man and God moves in him as he prays. 
Perish the thought that he there, face to face with God, would say 
one word adverse to his own theology which he has solemnly elabo- 
rated and spent a lifetime on—but he almost does. Yes, he prays 
in such a way that an Arminian could join him. He is asking God 
to save a certain man, and in his earnestness, while the doctrine of 
decrees is not denied, and need not be, it is retired for the time 
being and other doctrines, just as true, are brought to the front ; 
and the effect is as though his theology were getting modified, 
dropping its denominational marks, and taking on Catholicity. 

Anybody may be overtaken by these enlargements. Secular 
men are. They coin sentences that reverberate forever. They 
make speeches that go in among the classics of the race. They 
intend nothing. They had nota thought of ambition. They had 
not the least premeditation, very likely. But all the more because 
thus unconscious and void of purpose, they were open to the spirit 
of the age, or the spirit of history, or the spirit of a great national 
movement, or the spirit of God—call it by whatever name you 
please, I fancy that on inspection it will be found to settle down to 
that last, the spirit of God in a man. Witness Lincoln’s speech at 
Gettysburg. Witness many a hymn, and many a national hymn. 
Witness some music, in which the soul of mankind will speak itself 
forth forever. 

Also witness some Creeds, I say. The writers intended Fatal- 
ism of the most insufferable species, let us suppose ; but they shot 
clear over into Christianity, and Christianity ever after could use 
their Creed as a vehicle of her large meanings. After they had 
finished their production, they looked it over and pronounced it 
good—there was their Fatalism all out in elaborate black and white, 
all they could ask, so they think, but are deceived generally. In 
Creed-making, when the authors have made sure of the specialty 
most on their hearts, they start out into a pleasant excursion in 
some other parts of Christianity ; paying their respects to this and 
that doctrine not necessary to be very powerfully stated just then 
they fancy—moving therefore unpolemically—and it is in those ex- 
cursions, if nowhere else, that they are likely to trip and fall out of 

15 


188 YALE LECTURES. 


their specialty in a measure ; and all succeeding generations have 
the advantage of their misfortune, and sign their Creeds. The 
great God who notes the sparrow’s fall is unlikely to take no inter- 
est in a body of men in travail with a Christian Creed ; and while 
for wise purposes, He sometimes stands aloof and leaves them to 
bring forth a phenomenally mean result, at other times He passes 
into their spirits by His Spirit, and gives them a victory they never 
prayed for; a Creed for the ages, a Creed to be chanted through all 
the tribes of Israel; and when we chant it. we do not chant their 
intentions alone, but their magnificent inadvertency, their unknow- 
ing seership, their service in the will of God made articulate through 
them. What would not the Fathers say, if they could get up from’ 
their graves and see how their partial works have swept the world 
sometimes, the local and denominational widening into the univer- 
sal, the individual made great and representative of the whole 
Church on Earth. 

I think, then, that Creeds sometimes have a double sense ; 
man’s sense (the sense of their author) and God’s sense ; and you 
may sign which you please. If an ancient symbol proves large 
enough to hold all discoveries made since it was issued, very well, 
put the discoveries in mentally, and sign the whole thing. I repeat, 
a free use of Creeds is one of the ways by which we secure our 
liberty as thinking men. 

I come now to the last head in this discourse, and inform you 
that any anxious doctrinal questioning you may now have, will be 
likely to be eased by the simple lapse of time, provided you go 
forward in your plain duty, preaching what you know, bringing the 
Gospel to bear on men as well as you can, and looking constantly 
to God. 

How often does the following come to pass in the interior his- 
tory of ministers? During their years in the school of theology, 
and for some time thereafter, they lay themselves out full-strength on 
certain questions that seem to them to lie at the very threshold of 
theology ; requiring therefore to be settled before the business of 
preaching can be taken up in earnest. I hung for a long time to 
the inquiry touching the existence of a God, such as I had tradi- 
tionally received. I proposed to have that problem thought out, 
before I took one step in active life ; and then I proposed to make 
daylight shine through the incoming of moral evil into the universe 
of God. It could not be much satisfaction to discover a God to 


YALE LECTURES. 189 


be preached, unless I could discover that he is a good one, and 
worthy to be preached—and looking out on a creation in such ter- 
rible confusion, and distress as this one of ours, how could I find 
my way to the solid conviction, God is infinitely good? And soon. 
Questions and questions—and prime questions many of them, to a 
man about to spend his life in telling men about God and his ways. 
But, for various reasons, a man may find (as I did) that some of 
his questions cannot be solved by him at present ; whereat he falls 
back tired out and lets them go. He has done his best, and they 
must go. In the case of some of them he accepts that slender 
preponderance of probabilities which he is able to raise in regard 
to them, and goes on with his work. In the case of others, he 
makes a complete adjournment to some far-away and more lumin- 
ous future ; and proceeds to preach just so much as he has discoy- 
ered. His new work, with its splendid motives, and its successes 
very likely, wakes enthusiasm in him, and his old energy for un- 
wieldy questions therefore slackens. Ina hand-to-hand fight with 
evil he forgets to discuss how evil broke in on us originally. In his 
joyful proclamation of the Christian salvation, he forgets some of 
the intricate questions as to Biblical inspiration. There in the 
Book, beyond mistake, is the salvation, and that is enough to fill a 
man and keep him speaking with all his might. But by and by 
out of the pigeon-holes of his mind tumble by accident this and 
that old question of his ; and to his amazement, when he tests him- 
self on them he finds that they are settled, and he could not tor- 
ment himself with them now if he tried. Some of them are set- 
tled as being solved. When his present mind looks them in the 
face, they seem to have no special perplexity. He has not studied 
them since those old days of mental tribulation ; nevertheless they 
are clear—pretty clear. He has had personal experience of God, 
and that former debate—is there a personal and good God—is to 
him as though a man should fumble an axiom, and pretend to feel 
dreadfully because he could not understand it.. Experience goes 
where logic cannot. Perhaps I cannot demonstrate that my will is 
free, but I feel it free in me; so no matter about your demon- 
strations. And particularly in the things of religion, demonstra- 
tions become superfluous as experience enlarges. Experience 
makes you intuitive. Experience makes you a large and know- 
ing theologian. Experience enables you to sit back, high and 
lifted up and omniscient, in a sort of Olympian superiority, and 


190 YALE LECTURES. 


look down on the thinkers in the plain below, who in much dust 
and confused endeavor are wrestling with each other on the 
problem of a personal Deity, and the reality of an external world, 
and the facts of consciousness, and the probability of any kind of 
life beyond these present horizons, and the possibility of being 
saved from what we at present are, by the power of Jesus Christ. 
There they are, and up there he is—raised thereto by the actual 
doings of God in his soul. 

But experience does not solve all things, and so our minister 
finds that some of those old trying subjects of his are settled, not 
as being explained, but as seeming now not especially necessary of 
explanation. If I have no interest in getting a thing explained, it 
is as if explained, for all practical purposes. These indifferent sub- 
jects I dare not mention in full, lest I appear to belittle some that 
others think of solemn consequence. The philosophy of the 
Atonement is an interesting matter, but one can live and save his 
soul if he postpone it to some convenient eternity. Large areas of 
philosophical divinity need not be traveled now, and need not be 
preached. And as to what we do preach, there is this to say, that 
preaching a doctrine with a view to save souls by it, and not with 
a view to get a subject systematically unfolded, is just the Baconian 
way of discovering exactly what that doctrine is and whether it is a 
doctrine. A doctrine that cannot be used, is a false one. A true 
doctrine which, in use, seems not to serve God’s ends, and bless 
men, is misconceived at some point by the preacher. If all minis- 
ters were retired scholars, intent on theology and nothing more, I 
do not know in what misconceptions theology would not at last 
bring up. The salvation of theology is trying to preach it. Will 
it work? Putit tomen. Does it convince them? Does it bring 
them to God? When I read some of the essays and books issued 
by professors of theology, I say—blessed be studiousness and the 
cloister. When I go among the churches and see the preachers, I 
say—blessed be service in the field. Well, every man ought to 
have something of both. Persons made as I was could never 
get to a large and comfortable settlement in the truth, I fear, by 
the labors of seminary life. Inquiry is in danger of being fruitless, 
unless brought continually to the test of life and manful striving. 

Young Gentlemen, all through this hour I have carried an 
implication that some of you may be as I once was, and I have 
done what I could to show you the ways of liberty out in the world ; 


YALE LECTURES. 19] 


and possibly in my earnestness for so long, on that one point, I 
have seemed to provide more liberty than any one needs, or should 
take. I have no idea that many of you will find yourselves pushing 
and discomforted to get your liberty when you fairly come to the 
sacred and sweet ministries of your office. You will have passed 
through your curriculum, and in it will have become affirmative, 
and Creed-bound to a certain extent, and in an intelligent and 
wholesome way. You will have had some spiritual experiences 
which have confirmed your faith and enlarged your religious intelli- 
gence as much as the teaching of your teachers. And, back of all, 
as being earlier than all, stand (I hope) the faiths of your child- 
hood, your home nurture, the old nest-warmth, the magnetism of 
your mother, to mortgage you to God forever and make all serious 
Creed-wandering impossible. How we tug on those first moorings 
(the home-moorings) sometimes, but how they hold; and after we 
have sufficiently roamed the realms of inquiry and had our strain 
and peril there, how peacefully we return to our first rest, and wor- 
ship the God of our fathers. These conservative influences will 
work to make you not afraid of Creeds ; and that, joined with the 
fact that the theory of Creed subscription in these days is quite 
elastic in almost all Christian bodies, will give you a good sense of 
freedom. ‘I commend you to God, and to the word of His grace, 
which is able to build you up, and give you an inheritance among 
all them that are sanctified.”’ 


THE VAGUE ELEMENTS: IN 
LANGUAGE. 


Gentlemen, you are to be preachers some day not far off. 
Some cf you have begun already in a scattering and tentative way, 
and it is impossible you should too thoroughly understand the instru- 
ment, Language, whereby you are to get your impression on men. 
So that I fancy I may do you a service if, to-day, I discourse before 
you on the Vague Elements in Language, and the value thereof. 

I suppose you are already advised that it is your privilege to 
be clear, and convey ideas, definite ideas, when you speak, but I 
say unto you, it is your privilege also to be dim and misty, and 
convey no sharp-cut ideas at all, but only impressions ; which 
impressions in your hearers will be deep or not just according as 
you are dim and not clear ; the current doctrine, the doctrine I mean 
of the average man, that the sole function of language is to carry 
ideas into people’s minds, being a dreadful untruth, an untruth 
which has miserably circumscribed many a preacher and many a 
theologian, and has caused many an extremely lucid creed to be 
worshiped three times more than it deserved. 

I have nothing to say against clearness, as you will notice 
while I go on. Contrariwise, I should have been willing to speak 
to you to-day on:—The lucid elements in language and the value 
thereof ;—as willing as to undertake the cause of mistiness, were it 
not that the true, great function of Mist is not appreciated by the 
most and does not get its real place in courses of lectures here 
and elsewhere. 

This is a great and special era for insisting on perspicacity, and 
the disciples and enthusiasts of the perspicacious, in the scientific 
field, many of them at least, have got on now to the following pitch 


YALE LECTURES. 193 


of impudence ; namely, they are claiming that whatsoever is not 
absolutely visible, hearable, touchable, tastable, smellable, or what 
is the same thing, material, physical, and therefore demonstrable, 
is, on that account, not at all to be relied upon; and so in one 
grand affirmation, the entire kingdom of supersensible entities, 
including God himself, that crown and sum-total of imperceptible 
realities, is obliterated by these gentlemen. Now as against the 
modern agnostic position, and against the more outright doctrine of 
absolute denial, I on this occasion lift.up my doctrine of Mist, 
the legitimacy of vagueness, the sterling use of vagueness, the 
indispensability of vagueness indeed, in order to the highest impres- 
sion on the human mind. It is nothing against a thing that it can- 
not be explicitly formulated. It may be as real a reality notwith- 
standing that. And that it resists formulation is, as likely as not, 
one of the tokens of its immensity. 

But let us now carefully edge along into our subject and see 
what we find. A picture, gentlemen, is a statement, in a _termi- 
nology addressed to the eye and not to the ear. And whereinsoever 
it has force and arrests the beholder, it gets its hold first of all, of 
course, by its distinctness. ‘That stands central. A painted tree 
must be a tree to the eye, beyond a peradventure ; a man a man, 
a leaf a leaf, an animal an animal, and nothing else. If the artist 
starts to say tree, and leaves you debating whether it be not a human 
shadow that you are observing on the canvas there, that artist there- 
by advertises his own confusedness, and is in a vagueness that no 
lecturer can defend. For I should have said, there are two kinds of 
mist ; the mist of a weak and essentially misty mind ; and the mist 
of minds large, rational, lucid, who are as capable of clear statement 
as of fogging, and who never let in a shred of fog save as attendant 
upon, and an envelope of, a sunlit statement. 

So then the picture of which I am speaking ; the good picture, 
the powerful picture, has something to say, and says it in a tone 
that is crystalline and ringing. That to begin with, doubtless. So 
much as that I concede ‘to the cause of perspicacity. But now 
behold how the real and effective artist gets himself on beyond the 
finiteness of perspicacity, into the larger ranges of impression. For 
there is no use in talking to the contrary, whatever can be stated is 
too small to carry us completely away. However limited we may 
be ourselves, thank God, we have a life-long, constitutional hunger 
for the unstatable. Give us some token of that, O artist. Hang 


194 YALE LECTURES. 


out a flag over where the unstatable lies hidden. Draw for our eye 
a hand that points out into the vast which you cannot explore. 
Show us a wind blowing that way. Anything, anything, to tell us 
that beyond all that can possibly be formulated in the terms of your 
Art, there sweeps an Unknown; and that you are not yourself in 
the conceit that the statable is anything more than a dot to the out- 
spread unstatable. Some signal to notify us of that we must have, 
if we are to bow ourselves clear to the ground before you. 

A few days ago, with this thought foaming in my mind, I 
stepped into my parlor to see how my paintings there hung, showed 
in this great matter. The first one I chanced upon was a copy of 
Rosa Bonheur’s “‘ Changing Pastures ;’’—a work full of space, light, 
clearness, and beauty ;—no metaphysical theologian ever made an 
argument more translucent and incontestable than that woman’s 
showing of her wide stretch of waters, her crowded. boat-load of 
sheep in the foreground, her sweep of mountains in the distance, 
her human figures, the old shepherd and his oarsmen in the boat, 
and all the rest. Her realism and the bare, large vigor which she 
manifests in that out-standing and massive reality, are most admir- 
rable ;—and manly. I mean disrespect to nobody when I call 
such work as that manly. But Rosa Bonheur does not stop there. 
No. Here and there is a rent in her realism, through which we 
walk out of the real, and out of the narrowness of visibility, into 
the ideal with its immeasurable scope, its absolute openness and 
feeling of openness ;—the region wherein the soul of man is most 
at home and most elate, always. For example; the painter might 
have bounded her picture by a wall solid and high as heaven, and 
she might have arched over the entire scene by a great dome of 
stone, and shut us down under that to contemplate forever her well- 
painted, literal sheep—so’ literal that you can hear them bleat all 
packed together there; to these literalities of several sorts, I say, 
she might have confined us, with not a ghost of an outing any- 
where ; but—dear Soul! she wouldn’t do it, in truth she could not ; 
she could not herself endure to be imprisoned in that way. So, in 
place of a dead surface of wall, or any hindering thing, she set a 
brave, great sky ; a veritable God’s sky ; not a leaden, eye-confining 
thing, almost as bad as a wall, but a sky full of Beyonds and outly- 
ing infinitudes, a sky that beckons the impressible beholder into 
these roomy outings; so that while her picture is an earth-scene 
and tells an earthly story, and not the highest kind of one either, 


YALE LECTURES. 195 


but a lowly, rather, enlivened and glorified by no definite touch of 
sentiment or pathos ; nevertheless it widens away into the heavenly 
spaces, as all of earth ought to. } 

So much for the sky. Then under the sky and on the earth 
such touches as these occur—all of them outings for the contem- 
plative beholder, you notice. Of course, if the beholder wants to 
stop at sheep, and in sheep have his whole satisfaction, I do not 
know that he can find a lot more to his mind than these of Rosa 
Bonheur’s. If he knows a sheep when he sees it, and if sheep 
know him as a friend of sheep, as all dogs knew John Brown, and 
all breathing creatures loved Donatello, then he may sit down in 
this boat on the waters, this sheep-boat, and stay and have his per- 
fect bliss. He will escape all perils of the imagination, and be on 
first-rate terms with those scientists who cleave unto the finite and 
pooh-pooh all else. 

But most picture: lovers like to spread a little and wander, and 
get far-off, and be let forth into the unhorizoned ranges. They 
fancy that life’s literalities do themselves get a lift somehow and a 
transfiguration, if only in looking at them and dealing with them 
we have in us at least an obscure sense of something other than 
they ; other, vaster, and more dim. ‘Therefore this painter of ours 
comforts us by opening valleys back into her mountains ; great val- 
leys; valleys not painted but suggested by the top-lines of the 
mountains ; and as they are only suggested and not closely defined, 
you are at liberty and are invited to send forth your musing mind 
into them and expatiate to your heart’s content; a performance 
this, on the part of the painter, much more stimulating and satis- 
factory to you than though she had gone up the valley with you and 
told you all and everything, as she did in the case of her sheep. 

Moreover, by way of otherwise indicating her valleys, and not 
actually plodding along up them and showing you every step of the 
road, she starts her waters flowing back, and up, and when she 
gets those waters well started she stops them, but she stops 
them in such a way that when you notice exactly where they stop, 
it is plain as day that they do not stop there, but range on, you 
cannot tell how far; just as a winding road when it goes out of 
sight gives you the clearest kind of a notification that it is still 
moving on. Now what a cunning and masterful way of painting a 
valley it is, not to paint it, but hint it, somehow. How much more 
sizable and bewitching is a hinted valley than a painted one! 


196 YALE LECTURES. 


It is like a veiled lady; her indistinct face gives you a chance to 
glorify her; but if she lifts her veil, the facts are all out. The 
unveiled facts may be ravishing, but they cannot be so ravishing as 
your idealistic creation of that face when so far concealed that 
there is a chance to work your imagination upon it. 

But pass from Rosa Bonheur’s mountains and valleys and sug- 
gestive sky, to her treatment of the waters over which she floats her 
sheep. It was in her fond heart to make those waters lustrous 
under the slant lights of her sky; but lustres are likely to detain 
the eye on the surface and hold it away from the much more seri- 
ous and impressive thought and feeling of awful depths and glooms 
underneath. It were too bad to give usa stretch of sea with no 
fathomless mystery below, merely that certain soft hues might waver 
before us and shine and please. Therefore along the waves now 
and then she makes a submarine hint, and in the far foreground 
where the shadows of three human forms are cast upon the water 
from the boat, she, the painter, instead of reflecting them to us 
from the surface merely, as she might have done, carries them down 
and down ; as much as to say :—“ See now, this water is no shallow 
thing, but a shadowy abyss, it runs down, dimness below dimness, it 
widens away in tracts and tracts of gloom, it sequesters hordes of 
creatures, it treasures old wrecks, and the dead and the lost things of 
long ago, heaps on heaps ;’’—“ yes, it is a sea,” she says; “I can- 
not paint it for you, what terms are large enough for stating such a 
thing as that, but just you follow those three shadows into the 
depths and see what sort of a feeling they raise in you ;—it is not 
necessary you should have any clear ideas as you follow those 
shadows, it is better you should not; what you want is a great 
impression of submarine realities, and that is best secured by escap- 
ing the realism of detail and all distinctness, and all sense of 
boundaries.” 

I have spent an unconscionable time on this picture, you may 
think, but you are mistaken. In this one and particular study thus 
long-protracted I am getting some principles established which 
open a path for us into the innermost of my subject. I had 
thought to mention the vague elements in other pictures on my 
walls ; but I must not delay. There hangs there a copy of Church’s 
“Sunrise in the Tropics,” which begins with an exhibition of tropi- 
cal foliage as veracious and full of fact as the multiplication table. 
But then, immediately back of that in the picture, everything goes 


a i 


YALE LECTURES. 197 


into haze, a lovely illumined haze, deeper and deeper as you follow 
on into the remote. The forms of things struggle through it with 
great difficulty, and by and by they disappear altogether and your 
eye buries itself at last in complete confusion, a golden confusion ; 
but that confusion is by no means like a stone wall to end at. You 
cannot see through, I grant you, any more than you could through a 
stone wall—that is true—but unlike the wall, it does not stay your 
mind ; nay, it projects your mind into regions outlying, and you feel 
very much as though you were actually seeing breadths, and 
breadths and breadths of equatorial luxuriance and splendor. 

These illustrations of the indeterminate, and the function of 
it, taken from the painter’s art, are fascinating and endless, but I 
want to take you now over into the field of music; peradventure, 
that will help me on my way a little and still more confirm my doc- 
trine of the vague. 

I do not refer now to music wedded to words, and made to 
carry a theme contained in those words. I am playing off and 
away from words and language as yet, with a view to come down on 
that when I am ready for it, with a good momentum gathered up in 
these perambuiations through the other arts or modes of expres- 
sion, wherein I am now indulging. For, language, painting, music, 
sculpture, architecture, pantomime, all conceivable instruments of 
expression, have certain common features and in so far as they have, 
a study of one is a virtual study of the others. 

The majority of those who have a heart for music and réceive 
imperative and dear impressidns from it, are not themselves musi- 
cians. They understand neither the terms nor the grammar of the 
art. The whole thing is a foreign language to them, and therefore 
they cannot speak it; and if those who do speak it have any dis- 
tinct ideas whatever in that speaking of theirs, this horde of igno- 
rant but fond listeners know not what those ideas are. I appeal to 
the experience of many here present, if that is not so. Iam one 
of the ignoramuses in question. And yet, there is no sort or form 
of utterance, or noise-making, which works on me even approxi- 
mately as music does. I listen to it always when I can. I follow 
it about. I surrender my emotions to it. I was never yet ina 
state of rage which could not be utterly put down and made 
ashamed by music ; never in a grief which could not be profoundly 
ameliorated, for the moment at all events; never in a levity that 
could not be chastened, nor in a perplexity or general state of dis- 


198 YALE: LECTURES. 


trust that could not be led on and out into serenity ; and never yet 
was I in any seven-by-nine confinement in the finite, and there 
chafed, but music could infallibly toll me off towards and into the 
amplitude of the Infinite, where I could really get my breath and 
could mysteriously take on an imputation of its magnitude, and 
have some sense of possessing magnitude myself. But not one 
idea gets into me through that whole performance. Not one. If I 
listen to a preacher, I must attend to his meanings. Meanings are 
his one and only contrivanoe for getting at me and doing anything 
with me. Up there in a great sweat he stands conveying ideas, and 
down there in the pew I sit in a responsive sweat, trying to get 
ideas, so as not to lose the whole occasion. A twofold wretched 
tug, just because we are shut up to having ideas. I was told of a 
boy who, after a great deal of labor to make a composition, began 
one with this truly affecting remark :—‘“It is rather difficult and 
pretty impossible, to convey unto others those ideas of which you 
are not yourself possessed of.’’ Now if that boy had been a musi- 
cian, there would not have been a bit of need that he should con- 
vey ideas to anybody. His composition would have been as good 
without them. Whether musicians must themselves have ideas 
when they speak forth in that almost celestial language of theirs, is 
anicer question. Exactly what idea, now, lies back of each term 
of that cabalistic eloquence, do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, si, do? Please 
tell me that. And when those eight emptinesses get themselves 
together in all sorts of twist, double-twist, intertwist, and labyrin- 
thine elaboration, and thereby make people cry, and sometimes 
laugh, and sometimes rend heaven with their indignation, what real 
thought or thing is there to which that miraculous complexity cor- 
responds. When I throw out among you a sentence of this lecture 
of mine I am able to point you to some concrete thing which my 
words—most of them, not all—stand for. If I say, ‘‘Gentlemen,” 
you know what that means. It is not like do or re or mi, mere 
articulate noise. If I say, ‘Gentlemen, you know nothing about 
music,” the words :—Gentlemen, you, know, nothing, and music, all 
instantly suggest some reality that you can put you finger on, or 
your thought at all events. The term zo/hing in that sentence 
comes nearest to a failure in that respect. It would take a long 
hunt to find the tangible counterpart of nothing, I fancy; and I 
may say, as I pass, that that is one of the numerous words at 
which those vaguenesses get in wherewith, I contend, language is 


YALE LECTURES. 199 


saturated. But I am speaking of music, and I am charging vagueness 
on it—for is not a language vague which accomplishes its victories 
of influence without carrying ideas, and without being able to point 
to any perceivable thing in heaven or earth, that its do-re-mi’s, or its 
overwhelming combinations of do-re-mi’s, signify. The necessities 
of my subject to-day do not compel me to prove that musicians 
when they compose or musically perform, whether by their own 
tuneful throats or by instruments, are totally empty of ideas. All I 
am forced to say is, that all much-impressed but unmusical listeners 
to their goings-on are not so impressed by ideas conveyed. As a 
work of supererogation, however, I do hint, that musical composers 
and musical performers when they address us, are not in just that 
distinct labor to embody ideas, ideas clearly formulated in their 
own consciousness and anxious to be delivered, that writers and 
speakers are in who use ordinary language. Of course I do not 
say this as intending to disparage music in comparison with the 
other arts of expression. On the contrary I put it foremost ;— 
beyond Painting, beyond Literature, beyond Oratory, beyond every- 
thing. I like what Matthew Arnold says in one of his poems :— 


Miserere Domine! 
The words are uttered and they flee. 
Deep is their penitential moan, 
Mighty their pathos, but ’tis gone. 
They have declared the spirit’s sore, 
> Sore load, and words can do no more. 
Beethoven takes them then—those two 
Poor, bounded, words; and makes them new; 
Infinite makes them, makes them young, 
Transplants them to another tongue, 
Where they can now, without constraint 
Pour all the soul of their complaint, 
And roll adown a channel large 
The wealth divine they have in charge. 
Page after page of music turn, 
And still they live, and still they burn, 
Eternal, passion-fraught, and free 
Miserere, Domine ! 





Thus much in glorification of music. It is wonderful, unique, 
Heaven’s solitary child and darling. But in the midst of all this 
that I say about it, I ask you not to forget what I am chiefly after, 
namely, this ;—that Music holds this lovely and radiant queenship of 
hers, by reason in part of the fact, that she courageously dispenses 


200 YALE LECTURES. 


with the service of ideas and cleanly-minted conceptions; as 
often as any way not using words at all, as in instrumentation for 
instance ; and where she does use them, as in her do, re, mi, taking 
care to select arbitrary and utterly meaningless terms, that cannot 
be tracked back to any physical root like most terms; terms that 
cannot be traced to any particular association that explains their ori- 
gin, (as where a certain special new color recently came to be called 
magenta, because a certain great battle had just happened to be 
fought at an old-world place whose name was Magenta) : selecting 
terms, I say, that owe their origin to the stark, inexplicable, lawless 
volition of man, terms therefore as bare of associations or foregoing 
history, as a new-born babe ;—that is the vocabulary of Music, in 
so far as she has any. Nevertheless, let me say it once more, she, 
most nearly of all voices, voices the infinite, she most successfully 
raises in us those feelings whose chiefest peculiarity is that they feel 
in us exactly as though they had no limits, and would be blas- 
phemed if ever limits should undertake to circumscribe them. I 
tell you, Men and Brethren, we are all pretty small, but the small- 
est of us every now and then has emotions which, as we turn and 
look in on them, seems to be measureless—exactly that ; I have felt 
that a thousand times—measureless—or if on the remote outskirts 
of these emotions in us we observe some dim similitude of metes 
and bounds, they are so dim that they do not distress and suffocate 
us ;—they are like Rosa Bonheur’s sky, which is the end of her 
picture to be sure, the point at which her brush stopped ; but the 


point also and moreover and a good deal moreover, at which we 


are passed triumphantly on and out into whatever illimitable voyag- 
ing we have the sensibility and imagination for. 

I was getting off the substance of this statement not long ago, 
to a very practical and concrete woman, a woman of every-day, 
remorseless sense ; and she told me she wished I would stop talking 
in that way to her. She listened attentively, and was vexed, because 
she discovered nothing in her own experience that corresponded to 
those big moods and mental states that I pretended to be describing. 
Gentlemen, if any of you are vexed, I cannot help it. Perhaps 
some day, when you are old enough and impressible enough and 
reflective enough on your own inward state, this thing will begin to 
glimmer into you. Blessed be God for music, or for whatever thing 
has the knack to abolish horizons and let us out into the Infinite ; 
which, after all, is our native air. 





YALE LECTURES. 201 


Speaking of sounds, and of their power according as they are 
indefinite, consider a great, booming bell-stroke, or the go-off of a 
great cannon. When they first hit the ear, those sounds, they are 
even painfully definite and mind-piercing; as excruciating as a 
creed that assumes to get God defined completely and made porta- 
ble in the finite; but after a little that clear first crash has the 
decency to fine away and fine away and widen off into space, and 
grow vast, and by and by misty and wavering, till at last it hovers 
and pulses on the very verge of silence ; there it stands trembling 
as though loath to jump off and be eternally still ;—finally it jumps 
and is gone forever, and then it comes back and is not gone—then 
it dies again-—then returns a very tenuous and phantasmal ghost of 
asound. It reminds one of Tom Hood’s lines :— | 


We watched her breathing thro’ the night, 
Her breathing soft and low, 

As in her breast the wave of life 
Kept heaving to and fro. 


Our very hopes belied our fears, 
Our fears our hopes belied— 

We thought her dying when she slept, 
And sleeping when she died. 


So that vanishing sound thinned out through the whole 
immeasurable air, and when it expired no mortal could tell ;—but 
I ask you ; when is that bell-stroke, or that explosive cannon, most 
powerful ; when in the first crash it is separated from the encom- 
passing silence of the creation bya line of distinction like an abyss, 
or when its confines have come to be dubious, when it has reached 
the border-lands of Silence and is melting into silence, like snow 
into the river? Its vagueness is its glory. Its vagueness makes it 
seem large. Its vagueness holds us in a hush of emotion. Its 
vagueness energizes upon us and in us and produces emotions that 
are the duplicate of its own dreamy magnitude. And it is just so 
with many other inarticulate sounds. 

But let me now carry my doctrine of the vague over into Lit- 
erature, and observe how the case stands there. Take that poem 
of two verses, written by Alfred Tennyson, and called by him, 
“The Poet’s Song.” I think you will say, Gentlemen, that it 
requires good courage in me and all sorts of faith in my dearly- 
beloved vagueness, to go to that man for specimens of it. For who 


202 YALE LECTURES. 


that ever wrote is more crystalline than he, who more nearly ap- 
proaches the beautiful finiteness of Greek sculpture, who has cut 
more cameos, and who more delights in cameos, with their explicit 
particularity and their ever-legible lines of limitation? Yes, that is 
so; but Tennyson is a great man ;—he is no cameo himself and he 
cannot confine himself to cameo work. As a matter of pastime he 
may toss off a jewel like that, and there stop; but when he brings 
all his powers into the field , after he has done his fine cutting and 
given you a scene, a thing, a man, a thought, so that it stands out 
like a dog’s head on a door-knocker for distinctness ; he proceeds 
to call you off into regions circumjacent and large and misty, as 
likely as not, like the sea-begirt and fog-bestrown island on which 
he lives ;—-tones far-away you will hear—tones indeterminate—bells 
that are of earth perhaps and perhaps of heaven, wind-sounds “from 
unsunned spaces blown,” yes, revelries of the imagination, ordered 
and melodious revelries, he will give you, and in your joy you will 
forget cameos and crystals and all clear-cut forms whatsoever. 

I do not think that the poem—‘ The Poet’s Song ’’—is so good 
an illustration of all this as I might find, but it does furnish a good 
etching, an absolute picture ; and at the same time there is a noble 
off-look or two in it, which gives a sense of room and range ;— 
exactly as Rosa Bonheur, after she had painted her sheep with Ten- 
nysonian fidelity—there they are, sheep all over, precisely as God 
made them—indulges us in brave sky-lines and great suggestive 
chasms and valleys in her mountains, and great watery depths, and 
so on ;—so that we are in the expansibility of the Creation a little, . 
and not in the belittlement of a cameo. 

Tennyson undertakes to tell us in the two verses mentioned, 
that a poet went forth from the city into the country, seated him- 
self, and poured forth a poetic melody. And the melody was so 
fascinating and amazing, that a wild swan, a lark, a swallow, a snake, 
a hawk and a nightingale, all paused and listened, and declared 
they never conceived the like. As I read now, just watch these 
creatures. You can see them as visibly as though I had them here 
with me to pantomime the thing over again for your edification. 


The rain had fallen, the Poet arose, 

He passed by the town and out of the street, 
A light wind blew from the gates of the sun, 
And waves of shadow went over the wheat, 
And he sat him down in a lonely place, 





YALE LECTURES. 203 


And chanted a melody loud and sweet, 
That made the wild-swan pause in her cloud, 
And the lark drop down at his feet. 


The swallow stopt as he hunted the bee, 

The snake slipt under a spray, 

The wild hawk stood with the down on his beak 
And stared, with his foot on the prey, 


(It must have been marvelous singing that arrested him in his 
greediness there.) 
And the nightingale thought, “I have sung many songs, 
But never a one so gay, 


For he sings of what the world will be 
When the years have died away.” 


Now I do not know but that utterance is perfect, artistically 
and everywise. But that in it which engages my attention at the 
present, is first the author’s absolute conception of his scene ; no 
cameo I say was ever better cut; there is a statement for you as 
firm-lined and obvious as though made under oath, by the most 
incorrigible of realists ;—all the rights of perspicuity are religiously 
secured,—no holy creed were ever better in that regard; but see 
now secondly, how Tennyson slips in a magnitude or two, and gives 
us an offing here and there, an outrun into the majesty of the dim, 
a touch of atmosphere which like all atmospheres ever seen of man, 
comes just short of complete translucency ; and we all know that 
the one feature by which atmospheres get those lovely shows and 
carnivals of color wherewith they so intoxicate us, is this short- 
coming of theirs in the matter of clearness. 

When our poet has taken us into the country and spoken of 
the wind blowing from the gates of the sun, and of the cloud- 
shadows traveling across the wheat, he has therein and thereby 
given us a feeling of height and space out there. We are not 
invited to any small scene, like an etching hung ina gallery, but the 
whole creation is called in to make an occasion worth while. And 
that is a good start. Plainly it is no mere cameoist that has us in 
charge. Next he proceeds to inform us that this same whole crea- 
tion is made to be attent and is, in fact, just ravished by that out- 
poured melody from that man there seated. The prose way of 
stating that, would have been to state it straightforwardly, just as I 
now have. But to hint it, by picturing three or four animal crea- 


tures as arrested and attent, is three times as effective as any 
16 


204 YALE, LECTURES. 


statement. To our quick feeling, those intensely concrete and lively 
specimens of the creation are more than the creation, on the prin- 
ciple sometimes mentioned, a part is more than the whole ; as that 
veiled lady, you remember, was more revealed when partly veiled 
than when her entire unobscured face rose on us. 

By that cunning device, then, of the selected animals, Tenny- 
son takes us on an unexpected walk through the creation, a walk 
not precisely marked out either, but vague, vast and alluring. I do 
not say that we are wide-awake to all this, and consciously say to 
ourselves :—It is through the creation we are now going ;—no, the 
author does not wish us to be in such a state of clear intelligence 
as that. All he wants is to start a creation-feeling in us, while we 
concentrate on his four, interesting live creatures. 

Two releases, then, we have had already from the finite and 
narrow ;—both times into the outlying creation. But now comes a 
third release, not exactly into the creation this time, but into the 
future; and not into any finite and comprehensible future, the 
future, that is, of dates and days and periods, and generations, and 
slow great cycles ; the future that can be held in clear idea—no, 
not into any such terminable and little thing does he project us, 
but hear him :— | 


The nightingale thought, I have sung many songs, 
But never a one so gay, 

For he sings of what the world will be 
When the years have died away. 


When the years have died away! Are we detained on larks, 
hawks, swans, snakes, and nightingales now? Westarted with them ; 
for we must start on some solid and real thing always; and men of 
mind always give us some clear thing like that to begin with ;—or 
as I said before, in every picture there needs to be, for a central 
fact to tie up to, a statement, a cubical nugget of reality ;—but this 
nugget having been secured in this poem and we having gone all 
abroad from that, in a flourish or two, as I have explained ; we are 
caught up at last and shot forth and forward, farther than cannon- 
balls ever went, farther than space ever stretched, beyond the roll of 
time, into a nebulous Somewhere, so nebulous as to be next thing to 
Nowhere, and in that half—somewhere half—nowhere, our minds roll . 
about in just that big confusedness which the poet wants us to be 
in. He might have said or had his nightingale say :—ten thousand 





YALE LECTURES. 205 


years away, or a hundred thousand, or a million. Perhaps Jonathan 
Edwards, in his more acute and analytical moments, would have 
liked that better. There is a relishable, factual quality in that, that 
I can see myself. But I do not want to look at it long. I would 
rather be ballooned in the Infinite, to the sound of :— 


When the years have died away! 


There is also a touch of the supernatural in this poem, which I 
have not mentioned. How easy it is to construct a first-rate argu- 
ment wherein it shall be proved that the supernatural and the infi- 
nite cannot be set forth in natural and finite terms at all. “Natural 
terms! Physical terms! Limited terms! They embody the 
unlimited ! Why is not that a contradiction in so many words? 
By whatever laborious devices you carry this earth-bound, small ter- 
minology of yours over towards the supra-mundane and its immen- 
sities, and howevermuch you sublimate these terms of yours, as is 
often done in poetry, will they not distinctly savor all the same of 
their earth-born pedigree? Can they go beyond themselves? Must 
not all sky-piercing human structures stand on the earth and there 
keep standing however high they go, and rock when the earth 
rocks? What are God, angels, heaven, hell, and all the rest over 
yonder, as we conceive and describe them; and what can they be, 
but materialistic and anthropomorphic projections, long-stretching 
shadows of things here, that we have come to know about? An 
angel, conceived by a man, is a magnified man. And even God, 
in all our descriptions of him, is simply or mostly a powerfully 
idealized man, we might say. We call him a person and thus make 
him head up in a bounded consciousness, like us ;—an awful and 
large consciousness, to be sure, but the moment he is alleged to 
have consciousness at all, he is represented as fenced in from the 
great All of being, a section of the All, nucleated and organized ;— 
in fact, made little in order that he may be made conceivable to 
little folks like us. A friend of mine asked Matthew Arnold when 
he was among us recently, how he came to invent that much-bela- 
bored definition of God, which he has put into his books. He 
calls him you recollect, “that power other than ourselves that makes 
for righteousness.’”’ And he replied “that he did not invent it in 
the interest of agnosticism or unfaith, but in the interest of a larger 
faith.” He. had grown sick of the current belittlement of the 
Almighty in the customary religious talk about him as a person, and 


206 . YALE LECTURES. 


soon. He thought that the pious masses are under the delusion 
that when they have said person, and a number of other strictly 
human and cameo words, they have actually got God. Therefore 
he proposed to throw them out to sea and get some size into 
them, bereaving them utterly of their old, circumscribed lingo, and 
calling them to take note of, and be awestruck under, this rather 
finely conceived and first-rate vagueness ; “‘ That power other than 
ourselves that makes for righteousness.” What a sudden lift out of 
the smallness of personalism, that expression “he not-ourselves is! 
Whether it is in every respect a safe and wholesome thing to be 
lifted into the eminently thin ether of Mr. Arnold’s definition, I 
will not now say; but as to the whole notion that supersensible 
things and persons cannot be set forth to any good purpose by a 
naturalistic and human language; I say they can. What terms, 
pray, doves Mr. Arnold himself employ when he sets out to take 
away the people’s God, and give them another and larger one? 
Was the sentence ‘The power not ourselves,’ made out in this 
unknown that we all want to get into and talk about? I venture 
to guess that it was devised in the library of Matthew Arnold, 
and that every word of it is nothing but English—not divine, not 
even angelic, but earthly to the last degree. I presume you could 
trace those words into the earthly past a thousand years, and very 
likely find where they first came up out of the soil of earth and 
time. 

But I was remarking on Mr. Tennyson’s poem, “‘The Poet’s 
Song ”’—and saying there is an element of the supernatural in it ;. 
and in it you will see one of the ways by which the supernatural 
may be and often is set forth in the machinery of the natural. 
Those birds, snakes, and what-not, that were so captivated by that 
chanted melody—that human song so immensely transcending all 
songs of larks and nightingales—did not behave after the natural 
and well-known fashion of such creatures. Whether they have such 
intelligent and listening birds out in the invisible I do not know. 
Perhaps they do. Perhaps these that Mr. Tennyson saw were astrays 
from that land other than our own. At any rate, they are no birds 
of ours. And, don’t you see, we are just enough confused as to 
whose they are—whose and whence—to feel ourselves carried out 
and away and far away from the strictly terrestrial. It is precisely 
another other-than-ourselves contrivance. We go astride of such 
magnificent negatives and mind-puzzlers, and ride the realms of air 


—- — 


VALE LECTURES. 207 


—not into the invisible literally, perhaps, but into very imposing 
mist, wherein the effect on us is considerably as though we had 
become conversant now with trans-mundane territories. 

If I might take time for it, I could show you this same thing, 
this arriving at the supersensible by earthly means, in a much more 
striking development in Coleridge’s Christabel—where quite a 
number of weird and unclassifiable occurrences come in to lift our 
feet away from the ground and make us know that, wherever we 
are, we are not in this world merely. For instance, there is a mas- 
tiff that every night of his life, when the castle bell strikes twelve, 
puts forth just sixteen howls, twelve for the hours and four for the 
quarters. Where did such a dog as that come from, every rational 
human being proceeds to ask. And how is it that that barking of 
his is done always at the very hour, the awful hour, when his mis- 
tress of the castle died years and years ago? Now Coleridge has 
half a dozen or more inventions like this in that poem. And what 
is the result? He does not take you to any particular shore, land, 
coast, or remote station of the universe by these inventions, and 
definitely land you; but he takes you away from this time-land ; 
yes, that is the trick of it; he carries you off and leaves you no- 
where, and the nearest you can come to any description of your 
feelings, is to say—“ Well, here I am, but where am I!” and that 
is a pretty good description of the unearthly, the beyond, the 
invisible, in finite terms. 

But not merely in night-howling mastiffs and in birds bewitched 
by poets’ melodies, may the “country other than our own,” and 
the unperceivable people and personages off here “ other than our- 
selves,” “‘ that make for righteousness ” some of them, and some of 
them not, be expressed, but in single words also something of the 
same sort can be done. If I say of God, he is infinite, that is, 
not-finite, I think I have made on your mind a decided impression 
concerning him as he really is, I have taken an earth-born, finite 
word, and negatived it, and doing that, have pitched you out of 
the finite totally. To be sure I have given you no more spot to 
land on than had Noah’s weary dove, but that is precisely what I 
aimed at. If Noah’s dove had found a place for his anxious feet, 
he would not have thought it much of.a flood that he was sailing 
over ; and if my 7m-/inite, should set you down on any determinate 
thing or spot, you would certainly underestimate the divine ; just 
as when the Creeds say “ persons,’ and ‘ three persons in one 


208 | YALE LECTURES. 


nature,’ they (according to Mr. Arnold) almost minimize the 
Being they are describing. The truth is,.as soon as we have said 
persons, we must pour in the glorious confusion of our negatives, 
like non-finite, and start the people out of their comfortable earth- 
built snuggeries, (like persons and so on) and set them careering— 
not to say careening—across the uncharted expanse of the Bound- 
less. We want to leave them about where that old definition of 
infinite space leaves the mind; namely, “Infinite space is that 
whose center is everywhere and whose circumference nowhere.” 
That is just about what it is. Gentlemen, I am not the man to 
deny the legitimacy of Creed terms ; person, three persons, and all 
the rest. Ido insist, though, that while you are regaling yourself 
with your small bottles of water, you shall not be permitted to think 
that in those neat and delightful half-pints you have the ocean. 
And in order to prevent your thinking it, I say, let the ocean in on 
you, and paddle confusedly about in it and get to know its great- 
ness. Often one and the same word, or expression, may be made 
to have in it a clear, finite affirmative, and withal a flicker of the 
infinite ; as where the Nicene Creed declares the eternal generation 
of the Son of God. Generation is a terrestrial term, and a term of 
beginning applied in the non-terrestrial field, where terrestial flavors 
are impertinent ; but when you add the word “ eternal,” and deny 
a beginning to the Son of God you have somewhat purged your 
terminology of its earthly taint and made it serviceable in that 
region of the immaterial. 


You have often noticed the clear western sky illuminated by | 


the sun descending, or quite gone down, and have felt that that sky 
led you off and back and through and on, as to the very throne of 
God. But I submit you do not get so far back in a clear sky as 
you do ina sunset sky that is heavily clouded, but is revealed, a 
touch here and a touch there, through rents in those. cloud-forms. 
How deep and holy and sometimes awful in their splendor are those 
narrow in-looks. Gentlemen, our language of the supernatural, 
unseen and illimitable are cloud-terms; in which there are hints 
of those Beyonds-; mere hints, rents, partings of the finite, in-looks 
therefore, on-looks, through-looks, all the more intense and over- 
powering because thus framed in ;—as in picture-galleries you see 
better by looking through tubes. 


I make a turn now in my general subject and come up to- 


vagueness in language from another direction. 


YALE LECTURES. 209 


When I was discoursing on music a little back, I made the 
point that the effect of music is preeminently emotional, rather 
than intellectual; an impression on feeling, without any ideas car- 
ried over into the mind. I now have to say that while language is 
certainly a vehicle of ideas, and carries swarms of them into hosts 
of minds, clear ones, splendidly clear and satisfying sometimes ; it 
also in innumerable instances consents to be like music exactly ; and, 
while it talks on, and sounds intelligent enough, as a matter of fact 
secures in the listener emotionalism only, and no sense of ideas 
whatever. And that service of language is as great as any other, 
and ought not to be spoken against as though it were something 
unsolid and beneath human beings; especially educated human 
beings, like theologues in their third year, or learned professors in 
their many years. My mind is that great men who are void of just 
this mooniness do miss one of their chief bignesses, and had better 
begin right off to size out into the obscure, and take impres- 
sions that they cannot give much account of at the time,— 
impressions, I mean, that they do not at the moment trace to ideas 
received. 

Now language often prevails by the musical quality in it con- 
siderably. My yacht on the waves rocks me in the loveliest curves 
of motion conceivable. And rhythm in language rocks me. And 
rhyme rocks me. And the kiss and kiss of Hebrew parallelism rocks 
me. And the structural balance in the movement of many a prose 
writer rocks me, I find. I am not intellectual under it —at least, it 
is not that feature of the effect which I am considering now—I.am 
not intellectual, I am a babe and rocked. Robert Browning begins 
one of his poems thus :— 


Where the quiet-colored end of evening smiles, 
Miles and miles, 


and we are all delighted. But why? Because of the clear scene 
in it, of course, the lovely distance, the expansiveness of the whole 
thing and the beauty spread over all. But there is more than that 
in it. There is a flow of melody. Hear those ravishing liquids 
and vowel-sounds murmur along together,—the evening smiles, 
miles and miles. And while I am on this passage let me name to 
you another subtle power in it. By the monotony of that melody, 
our feeling, unbeknown to ourselves, is chastened and made seri- 
ous, and thus brought into accord with the pensiveness of the 


210 YALE LECTURES. 


evening. We are put into an evening mood, so as to look at the 
quiet-colored horizon off there, and at 


The solitary pastures where the sheep 
Half-asleep 
Tinkle homeward thro’ the twilight, stray or stop 
As they crop— 


to look at the whole, I say, with adjusted and suitable eyes. Now 
Browning did not think out all this contrivance of expression for 
getting the upper hand of us. No, it was not stratagem in him, 
but spontaneity,—cultured spontaneity. He felt thus and so him- 
self, and he simply poured this his feeling forth; and we are 
caught. It is not a matter of ideas on either side,—his or ours. 
You add up all the volumes that Shakespeare ever wrote, and it 
would not begin to equal the volumes that Shakesperian commenta- 
tors have written to explain his cute ways of fascinating us ; whereas 
most often he wasn’t cute and intentional at all. Is a bird cute and 
intentional when he sings? Is a flower full of plans on us when it 
blooms? Is God premeditative and strategic when he loves? 

Now Brethren, keep hold of my exact point. I am running 
down ideas, conscious, clear ideas as necessary factors and sole fac- 
tors in self-expression, and in receiving impression from language. 
Dr. Elisha Kane relates that during one of his long winters in the 
vicinity of the north pole, a certain sailor on his ship was observed 
to be weeping over Tennyson’s :— 


Break, break, break 
‘At the foot of thy crags, oh Sea, 
But the tender grace of a day that is dead 
Will never come back to me. 


I never asked the sailor, but I will engage that if he had spent 
his whole winter trying to find out wherefore he cried, he could not 
tell. He could tell some things ; as that the “‘ Never come back to 
me,” started his heart homeward, and also set him wondering 
whether he should ever see home again, and get away from that mis- 
erable old inscrutability, the north pole. But it would not have oc- 
curred to him that Tennyson’s music was stealing into him, and the 
gray tone of the music, the monotony, the sombre refrain ; also the 
bright images in the background of the poem, on which these gravi- 
ties were projected and made more grave :—also never could he 
have devised the connection of thought between these two lines :— 


a 


YALE LECTURES. 211 


Break, break, break 
On thy cold gray stones, oh Sea. 


(Just hear the lament in those vowels—“ thy-cold, gray, stones, 
oh Sea’’) and these other two lines of the same verse :— 


And I would that my tongue could utter 
The thoughts that arise in me. 


What is the connection, anyhow? Most people cannot tell. No 
matter what the connection is. Stop trying to get ideas. You can 
cry without ther, just as well. The first real, old, luxuriant English 
ivy that I ever saw, an ivy that covered every inch. of a church 
tower several feet deep, was at Muckross Abbey, in Ireland ; and I 
cried. What did I do that for? Was not that being more mooney 
than was really necessary? Did I cry under a sudden uncommon 
access of ideas? I never was emptier of ideas in my life. Men 
and Brethren, do you not know that three quarters of the chords 
that vibrate in us are below our consciousness ; that more than half 
of our experiences come from strokes made on those sub-conscious 
chords ; that preaching, or old ivies never reach their utmost power 
till they reach them and play on them; that those chords are 
reached without ideas even better than with them; that a Creed 
partially fails, if, while it states thoughts as clear-cut as a minted 
dollar, it does not at the same time start the mysterious depths in 
us, the sleeping sub-bass strings, the strings of mystery, the strings 
that talk large and talk vague, like that bell-tone that I described as 
widening abroad through the infinite air, so spiritual and unmeas- 
urable at last? 

I can tell now about that ivy business, in part at any rate, 
because I have analyzed it. I have been down into myself with a 
search-warant, and after I had read Browning’s ‘‘ Love Among The 
Ruins,” I did the same thing; and I have no objection to self- 
search, in itself considered ; but I resist the doctrine that emotions 
not thought-born are illegitimate ; bastards and not sons ; that there- 
fore language must bend its whole strength to begin clear; when 
the most superfine and celestial instrument of expression that we 
know of, (music) has its main strength in not being’ clear ; I resist 
the doctrine for many reasons. ‘The first reason is, that I know 
better—know it by having thought it out, and know it by a hundred 
experiences of my own. ‘The second reason is, that everbody else 
knows better, if he is old enough to examine his own contents and 


212 YALE LECTURES. 


will calmly do it with this matter in his mind. The third reason is, 
that religion cannot live without my doctrine of vagueness. It may 
have a name to live, in the form of cold-blooded, finite and small 
propositions ; but religion in its fulness and full power is a thing 
saturated with awe; and how can awe keep itself alive while look- 
ing up simply into the small face of a definitely-stated immaterial, 
invisible, immeasurable and divine. My fourth reason is, that if 
preaching is content to be propositional, lucid, exact and religious 
in the canned form only ; an eternal display of cameos ; it can have 
no such efficacy among men as it ought to. When you come to 
that particular kind of work and declare it the only kind that has any 
right to be done, you have practically and in principle gone over to 
materialistic scepticism ; which has settled down on the theory that 
only the thing which can be brought into measurable dimensions, 
and really grasped, is a thing at all, and entitled to our respect. 

Now Brethren, in the progress of my thought to-day I hope 
I have not accidentally disrespected clarity in expression, and 
those extreme labors of clarification which are so congenial to 
many minds both eminent and common, in the pulpit and out of it. 
I listen to them sometimes when they are simplifying things and 
putting them up in minute packages,—‘“ breaking the bread up small 
and putting it on a low shelf,” so that the most undeveloped of us 
can get the good of it—lI listen to them, and watch them, and 
notice how manfully they contend with the universal haze of things, 
with a thorough-going gusto; and when with much tugging they 
push back the line of haze one space farther, and widen the hori- . 
zon of the definite, I am as pleased as anybody ; but I cannot help 
reminding them every now and then, that what I have often noticed 
in the brightest days of the year in London, may be noticed also 
in those areas of thought which they have most triumphantly clari- 
fied and flooded with daylight, to wit ;—the very daylight never 
fails to have a sweet blue haze in it. Look up into the dome of St. 
Paul’s, and there it is, and no mistake. Out of doors I said, What 
a perfect and shining day this is, in this celebrated old fog-land ! 
But all the while the haze was there ; and likewise in subjects, when 
you have reached the acme of translucency, you need to wash your 
sunshine once more; and then and moreover, we all know, and 
these gentlemen themselves admit, that a few miles back in the 
subjects which they have so cleared, there begins a gloaming which 
deepens back into midnight. 


YALE LECTURES. 213 


It is interesting to remember that every word they use is 
stocked with several meanings and is likely to bea bit muddled on 
that account. First of all, it has more or less of its primary and 
physical meaning, the taste of the earth from which it sprung; and 
some man who listens to them will detect that aboriginal flavor. 
Next, the word has lingering in it its historical meaning, the savors 
it has picked up in its passage down ages and ages of use; and 
some listener will be ferretting out that. Next, if it so happens 
that the word is an inspired one, because the man who utters it is a 
temple of the Holy Ghost, it will have in it a God’s meaning, 
which meaning perhaps the speaker himself has no thought of, and 
which most of his hearers also may not perceive, while some truly 
sensitive and clairvoyant perceiver in the assembly will get hold of 
it. Next, (and finally—for I cannot mention all the contents and 
cargoes in each word of man)—next, I say, that word thrown out 
among the people, is like the shadows in a lake caused by the 
trees, heights and buildings on its banks. Those trees, heights and 
buildings are fixed and stationary things, in the main, and are there- 
fore able to cast stationary and restful shadows, if only they can 
have a restful surface on which to cast; but the lake is mobile and 
unstable—it lies still and glassy when it wants to; and then those 
shadows look like their originals on the bank ;—then again it rip- 
ples, it rolls; then clouds float over and kill those bank-shadows 
altogether ; and so it shifts on. 


“The shadows on Loch Katrine’s breast 
Are neither restless nor at rest.” 


Thus words ; they go out upon a thousand different minds and 
take their luck. Say Imagination to one man and he scowls; say 
it to another and he smiles all over. It is sometimes said that a 
man sees in Europe only what he takes to Europe. Well, a man 
sees in a word only what he takes to it. One day in my congrega- 
tion, Dr. Horace Bushnell took his hat and left, in a spurt of honest 
wrath, because I asked the people to sing the tune America. They | 
stayed and rolled out America with a great noise, but he would not 
hear it, because it was God Save the Queen, one of the national airs 
of England, stolen and rechristened America. So it is with all things. 
They have the bad luck to fall on different minds, making peace 
sometimes, and sometimes a pother. JI amused myself this morn- 
ing thinking about you students, and what variegated impressions the 


214 YALE LECTURES. 


sight of you in a body here in this chapel makes on this miscella- 
neous fringe of people, right, left, and all around. I know what I 
think of you, but Bob Ingersoll looks on you with mingled pity 
and contempt. And alongside of him sits a minister who has 
averaged you and concluded that you do not seem as intellectual 
as the students of his day. So that he is afraid the ministry is flat- 
tening out. Another minister knows better, he thinks. He says 
you look first-rate. One brother out there has himself had a hard 
and depressing time in the ministry, and your hopefulness, as you 
look forward to your work, makes him almost sick. One old min- 
ister, who has had just strength enough left to get to this Chapel 
and sample a few of my lectures, is mightily pleased because the 
gaps made by the fading away of the old men are so sure to be filled. 
Another man weeps because you remind him of his son who died 
while in his divinity studies. And then the ladies over here have 
their views. Some of them just mother you. Some have “ thoughts 
too deep for tears ’’—on William Wordsworth’s principle, perhaps— 


To me the meanest flower that blows can give 
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears. 


That is the manifold picture you make, Gentlemen. It is not your 
fault. You are solid and immutable enough, as an object. These 
brick buildings are hardly more so. But these minds that gauge 
you, they are regular Loch Katrines :— 


In bright uncertainty they lie, 
Like future joys to Fancy’s eye, 


and you have to suffer. People find in you, and in words, just 


what they take to them and to you. And that is an element of 
incertitude in language. 

Then too, the clear speakers, who make a god of clearness and 
think there is no other, for I am addressing myself to their case at 
present, cannot themselves define one in a hundred of the words 
they use. They cannot define them extempore and at the moment 
when they use them, nor later (ordinarily) when they have had 
time to think on them with all their might, can they define them. 
When I came to make a Lecture or two for you on Imagination, I 
thought, in decency, I ought to tell to a dot what Imagination is, 
and I found I did not know. Then I consulted two or three meta- 
physicians, and I found they did not know. Then I came back to 
my own wisdom, took a deep dive into my own consciousness and 


hee Dine = 


YALE LECTURES. 215 


strove to evolve a definition from what I myself might inwardly have 
of Imagination. I evolved three corners of the thing—enough for 
my purpose as a lecturer—and the other corner is under water yet. 
Generally from two to three corners are under. I had all my life 
been wont to speak of Imagination ; and all my life the listeners to 
me had conceived that they knew what I meant; but not a man of 
us could draw a clear line around that thing, and make it stand out 
in absolute separateness from every other human faculty. 

Such is language, Young Gentlemen,—the instrument we are all 
using so fully, and looking intelligent while we use ; the instrument 
you will do your preaching with and draw up Creeds with, and wreak 
yourselves upon with great enthusiasm sometimes. Well, wreak on. 
I have no objection. I myself have been wreaking on it for the last 
hour or more. But let us not pretend that these dice we play with 
are perfect. If only they were, some questions would have been set- 
tled thousands of years ago. But how can they be settled when the 
coin of interchange is of indeterminate value? How much are those 
dimes and half dollars and dollars, that are flying about in such helter- 
skelter fashion? Nobody quite knows. Often, when a speaker passes 
a dollar, as he supposes, the man in the pew sees but ten cents in it. 
And occasionally the speaker’s ten cents is worth a hundred dollars. 
The fact is, language as used is a semi-chaotic flux of incertitudes, 
wherein we are exercised most wholesomely for something better yet 
to come ; beatific visions, and other visions. Of course here and there 
in the welter there emerges a limited spot of solid land ; the ascer- 
tainable and ascertained ; and on those spots we sit down and have a 
dear good time. Not because such unsizable and stingy spots are so 
much in themselves, but being all we have they are valuable ; and be- 
sides, they show that spots emerged are possible in our case. If they 
are, we may hope for more of them gradually. At any rate, they are 
gcod spots to jump from and take with us when we are called to go 
out of this seeing in a glass darkly and knowing but in part. 


Our little systems have their day; 

They have their day and cease to be; 
They are but broken lights of Thee, 
And Thou, O Lord, art more than they. 


We have but faith; we cannot know; 
For knowledge is of things we see; 
And yet we trust it comes from Thee, 
A beam in darkness; let it grow. 


216 | YALE LECTURES. 


I do not quote these lines as accurately consecutive to what I 
have just been saying, in the form of them, but because in their 
spirit they are consecutive enough, and because in ihem I find that 
mingled confidence and half-pensive sense of limits which I find to 
be habitual within myself—that mental state which led me this week 
to write out this my last lecture to you for this year. I bid you 
farewell. 


i i I 


THE SERVICE OF ART IN 
| RELIGION. 


(1.) 


That body of Christians with whom it has been my lot to be 
connected, is infested by what I consider a prejudice against the 
use of the beautiful in the service of religion ; which prejudice de- 
clares itself in divers ways, such as: 

First, an altogether too powerful array of unarchitectural and 
unadorned church edifices :—edifices that may shelter the people 
from storms, but do not in the least minister to culture, besides 
being deficient in several other respects. 

Secondly, in a strong dread of—not to say contempt for— 
everything decorative, or symbolic, in connection with religion and 
religious worship ; the entire elaborated symbolism, painting, and 
sculpture of the Church of God at large, being lumped together as 
suspicious and swept away at a stroke :—the Cross, as recalling the 
passion of the Lord and the deepest idea of the Christian life, being 
repudiated almost as energetically by some, as the more far-fetched 
and artificial symbols whereon men have doted. There must be 
no sculpture in the house of God. And there must be no painting 
—none, at least, that has any meaning init. There may be frescoes, 
perhaps, and in scattered instances profusions of color have been let 
in; but the rule has been that the instant those colors proposed in 
any wise to express some divine thing, some scene in the life of the 
Lord, some great historical figure like an Apostle or a Martyr, some 
thought dear to the heart of universal man ; that over-vaulting am- 
bition has been stamped upon, and stamped to death. So, not long 


218 : YALE LECTURES. 


ago, in a certain city when I stepped in to look at the rejuvenated 
interior of a sacred building belonging to an historic and opulent 
church, lo! I found myself in a gorgeous bar-room, or saloon, so 
far as the coloring was concerned; and not even the well-chosen 
texts of Scripture strung along below the cornice in suitable, strong 
colors, could in anywise begin to redeem the thing and make a 
church of it. 

Thirdly, our antipathy to the beautiful, shows itself in a four- 
square resistance of all hands to that most serviceable of the arts, 
Christian music, in its higher forms—in those forms, that is, which 
represent as no other contrivance of expression can, the inward life 
of man, in its multiformity, multiplexity and immeasurable yearning. 

Fourthly, we are shy of all liturgical advance among us, sus- 
pecting that if public worship starts out deliberately and consciously 
to be decorous and perhaps beautiful, some enervation will manage 
to creep into our piety, some luxuriousness, some esthetic volup- 
tuousness, at any rate some stiffness of formalism and resulting 
awful chill of death. | 

These are some of the tokens of our denominational suspicious- 
ness towards the beautiful. Perhaps there are others; but these 
are enough to indicate our trend. If I have seemed to speak 
pointedly of this matter, and with a flavor of disrespect, it is not 
because I want to be impudent or unfair or unloyal to my denomi- 
nation. No; what Iam most after, is to make the thing I mean 
stand out and be distinctly visible. That I am not unfair, or un- 
appreciative of these views whereof I have spoken, will appear, it 
may be, as I proceed now to name some of the sources of our Con- 
gregational aversion to esthetics—an aversion, I may add, wherein 
we have the sympathy of some other pious bodies of people. 

I. To begin with, we are the descendants, both lineal and 
spiritual, (numbers of us lineal and all of us spiritual) of a certain 
historical, much-buffeted, resolute and solid people, who by the 
grace of God discovered that the religion of their day and land had 
gone into affiliation and whoredom ( an affiliation that amounted to 
a whoredom) with Art—fine art—the arts of expression and impres- 
sion—so that in that three-fold, good classification of all thinkable 
realities which Plato made out for us ; namely, the True, the Beauti- 
ful and the Good—the Beautiful had gone into the saddle, and was 
riding the other tvwo—a most preposterous and profane thing, our 
Fathers said. So they shouldered in to right that. And after the 


YALE LECTURES. 219 


frequent manner of reformers, they righted it more than was neces- 
sary. Not merely did they unhorse the Beautiful and seat Religion 
in her vacant place, but they proceeded to have Religion ride over 
the prostrate Beautiful till her breath was clean gone out; her 
sculptures and paintings and millinery and pageants and even her 
innocent decorums, they annihilated ; and her great and venerable 
cathedrals—the four walls that had harbored all the .aforesaid frip- 
pery—came in for a share of their mighty disrespect. The reality 
in that movement was its sound intention to exalt religion, by sepa- 
rating it from its too great reliance on the esthetical, and establishing 
it on its own colossal and very sufficient foundations. 

The noise of that contest has died away, and all is still as we 
look back there, but the heat of it keeps up, and it makes us who 
are successors of those men—I will not say hot, but obstinate. And 
yet, you see, there was an idea there. Even if our Fathers could 
have been persuaded to confess that Art has a legitimate function 
on earth, and even in religion a good function, they would have 
gone straight on to add :—Nevertheless, as things now are, the 
Church must be pulled away from all that, and totally weaned. 
Only thus can her salvation be secured, in the present emergency. 
Moderate drinking may be defensible, but she, the Church, has got 
where she cannot drink moderately. Her lust of beauty is too 
strong. If she takes one drop she is drunken. Let her be put on 
to bread and water, and there kept—perhaps forever, for her soul’s 
health. 

II. Moreover, the Fathers did not make this trenchant gen- 
eralization against Art on an inspection of English Christianity 
alone, but on a survey of the ages. ‘They looked abroad and afar 
and they noticed that the submergence of religion in the esthetic 
element had occurred a good many times and in many nations, and 
they surmised that there was a law of deterioration therein :—a rule 
that a religion must grow effeminate and carnal if she does not 
eschew Art pretty thoroughly. Witness Romanism, and the great 
Church of the East. Witness Greece, where fine Art reached such 
a splendor as the world never saw before. Did her Art save her? 
Did it not rather ungird her, slacken her sinews, enfeeble her hold 
on higher ideas than that of beauty, and enfeeble their hold on her, 
so that she must rot away in her entire substance and cease forever 
from among men. Go into the museum at Naples and look at the 
art-works of exhumed Pompeii. Mark their excellence. Notice 

17 


220 YALE LECTURES. 


what a sense of the Beautiful that Pompeiian people must have had. 
But observe at the same time their unspeakable demoralization— 
their obscenity even in their art; their fitness to be suddenly buried 
by the wrath of God, using his volcanoes to dothe work. That was 
the way the Fathers were prone to reason. And we cannot deny 
that great devotion to beauty and Art, and great moral enfeeblement 
and corruption, have existed together often, whether one was the 
cause of the other or not. There was Lord Byron, there was Rob- 
ert Burns, there was Tom Moore, there was the poet Shelley, and 
numbers more, three times worse than they, in whom the feeling for 
beauty, the sensitiveness to beauty, and the power of beautiful ex- 
pression, the art instinct, was exceeding strong. Burns, Byron and 
Moore even wrote religious hymns, and did it well—much better 
than the average saint ever did ; but all these refined gifts of theirs 
did not make high-toned men of them. Beauty and the love of 
beauty did not establish the kingdom of God in their hearts. 

I do not know but [ am getting out the Puritan’s argument for 
him in a way so strong and fascinating that I can never overthrow it. 
But I want to be fair, you see. I had rather make it overstrong and 
take the consequences, than to be mean enough to make it too weak. 

III. Again: Puritanism claims sometimes, when it argues this 
subject, that the passing of our ideas, thoughts, feelings, forth into 
material embodiment in architecture, painting and all the rest, does 
by the necessity of the case make a materializing influence on the 
mind—an influence adverse to spirituality. That is the supreme 


peril of artists, it is thought. They deal with form. That is, their _ 


business is to formulate. If they could only be content to leave all 
human ideas and feelings unformulated, not made visible, not 
physicalized, in color and in lines and in all the cunning contrivances 
of their craft, all would: be well; but the plastic instinct in them is 
uncommonly strong and gives them no peace until they have re- 
duced the ideal to a finite and sensuous statement of some sort ; and 
they must take the curse of this their own restless inability to just 
abide in the ideal, the unstated, the unphysicalized. If only while 
they were stating they did not supremely concentrate their attention 
on form, they might still be saved ; but it lies in the nature of their 
business that they should thus concentrate ; they would not be artists 
unless they did. So on they go, poor things, preparing the means 
of a quite possible ruin for themselves, and an equal danger for all 
people who are very much given to beholding their beautiful works. 


a 


YALE LECTURES. 221 


The physicalization of the mind, incident,to all artistic expres- 
sion :-—-that is the argument. 

And similar to that is the notion that many great Christian 
ideas, when circumscribed by the terms, color and what not, which 
the artist uses, are so much circumscribed as to be belittled and 
almost or quite profaned. Let them remain forever unexpressed. 
In the Vatican Palace at Rome, I recollect seeing somewhere a 
representation of God the Father, by Michael Angelo, if I remember 
aright. God the Father, was set forth by this most insufficient and 
awfully minimizing device; namely, the head and shoulders of a 
respectable looking old man. There are many things which one 
might say about such a performance as that ;—and some things 
might be said in regard to the frequent efforts of ancient art to 
portray our blessed Lord ; but all I need to say just now is what all 
of us do probably feel, that while numberless religious truths, events 
and persons, cannot be put into form adequately, some cannot at 
all, and had therefore. better be carefully let alone, even by such a 
magnificent genius as Michael Angelo, and much more by that 
swarm of lesser men who have ventured upon divine themes. 

Well, people of the Puritan way of thinking, enlarge that obser- 
vation to cover all efforts of art in the religious field. Religion suf- 
fers, they say, by being subjected to expression in the close-cramped 
terminology of the painter’s and sculptor’s art. I suppose they 
would concede a little more to music. So I should hope, at all 
events, — 

IV. Once more, we Congregationalists revert admiringly and 
lovingly to a certain solid, world-impressing cultus generations back 
in our denominational history ; an immensely seminal affair as re- 
gards the civilization that has unfolded on this continent, to our 
great glory before all nations ; a cultus full of God, and every con- 
ceivable moral tonic. But that very cultus, we. remember, was 
associated with great bareness of Art, as was natural in view of our 
very Protestant origin in England (as already explained), and so now 
we find ourselves tender in our hearts towards bareness of Art, and 
not unwilling to have it perpetuated among us, as it visibly is; 
we impute to that bareness the renown of that great cultus back 
there, with which it was connected ; we are under the beguilement 
of association. A white meeting-house is a staring discord of color 
in any green landscape, and nothing better than a monotony in 
any landscape of snow; but those redoubtable progenitors of ours 


222 YALE LECTURES. 


worshiped in such, and we want to. If they had been puling creat- 
ures, and nothing to be proud of, we might have given in on the 
white meeting-house question and let the laws of color have their 
way and our church edifices melt harmoniously into the color-tones 
of Nature ; but they were not puling, but great, and they shall not 
be dishonored by having anything abolished that belongs to the 
thought of them and their life, whether building, psalm tune, ritual, 
ecclesiasticism, or anything else. A quite noble feeling in itself 
considered, no doubt. ‘The only question is whether that ancient 
cultus cannot be preserved in the core and power of it, without an 
everlasting sanctification of its incidentals in this manner. 

V. Another thing. Our Fathers were burdened by great prac- 
tical tasks in this new country, which consumed their entire vigor, 
so that it was not possible for them to indulge themselves in even 
innocent flirtations with Art—and we their descendants are in 
something of the same difficulty. 

VI. Moreover, in those scattered instances where we have 
emancipated ourselves from that primeval art a little, we sometimes 
have committed the fundamental mistake of discarding utility for 
the sake of beauty, building fine churches under a supreme medie- 
val impulse, which were indeed very fine to look upon, but very 
faulty in regard to air and light and hearing: all essentials to healthy 
worship. Also in music, when we have pulled away from the tune 
‘“‘Mear,’’ and from “China,” and from other like solemnizing strains 
wherein the ancients worshiped, we have occasionally been taken 
with headiness and vaporing, (not to say capering) and have let 
music run away with us; and in the matter of decorations (as in 
that saloon church that I inspected) we have sometimes done things 
that make the simplicity of the Fathers seem good and sweet. All 
mistakes of that sort get quoted profusely, of course, as so many 
arguments against mingling esthetics with religion. I have no time 
to make a list of these mistakes. Neither have I time to draw out 
all the other strong points made by the Puritan reasoner on the 
subject of Art and Religion. I will only add on this general branch 
of my theme: 

VII. That we, the Congregationalists, have no such special 
connections with a transatlantic Christian body, as the Protestant 
Episcopalians and the Romanists have; so that while they are 
greatly influenced, on the side of sacred art, by the art culture of 
those foreign bodies, we have the advantage of almost no foreign 


YALE LECTURES. 223 


influence whatever. Their church art is almost dominated by the 
old-world civilization. Whereinsoever, under the limitations of 
American life, they can expatiate in Art, they are apt to expatiate 
along historic and accredited lines. Among us, on the other hand, 
each parish committee expatiates along its own lines. Not only are 
the committee mostly unconscious of the art-wisdom that for ages 
has been accumulating in foreign lands, but they are largely una- 
ware of what wisdom has happened to accumulate here in their own 
denomination ; because the denomination is, perhaps, the least 
organized, and the least compacted into a corporate consciousness, 
of any on the continent. In matters doctrinal we manage to diffuse 
through the whole body the sense of the whole ; but in matters of 
religious art we diffuse much less, so that misbuilt church edifices 
and misconceived rituals, and misbegotten church music, and in- 
expressive and indefensible ornamentations, and astiff-necked local- 
ism, are more common among us than is agreeable. 

My Brethren, I make a complete turn now, against’ this whole 
prejudice in regard to Art. Thatside has had the floor long enough. 
I perceive its plausibilities. I acknowledge the realities that are 
sprinkled along through its argument. I agree that as between 
Religion and Art, art must give way to religion in every contest. It 
must, and it ought to. Moreover it does. Sooner or later it does. 
And it always will. For religion is superior to art. We can live 
without art. We cannot live without religion. 

But I contend that God meant art to be the handmaid of religion, 
and if, in any instance, they are found to be adverse one to the 
other, it is the work of perverse men and Satan; even as good 
marriages are soinetimes muddled by intermeddlers, and men and 
women who are made to pull together do not. 

On the general question cf beauty and its function, and whether 
it has a function, I submit the following observations. I hope they 
will go to your hearts. Even if they do not convince you, may 
they go to your hearts and trouble you and start inquiry. 

First, what does it mean that a perception of the Beautiful, 
and a sensitiveness to-the Beautiful, is a universal feature of the 
human race? Given any development whatever, that feature 
emerges. The lowest savage has his esthetics, such as they are. 
An animal has not. The beaver and the bird and the squirrel and 
the bee do some praisworthy building. The carpentry of the beaver 
will bear examination, as well as the architecture of Giotto. The 


294 YALE LECTURES. 


nest of the bird and the honey-cell of the bee and the structure of 
the coral are in curves, and have that appeal to our sense of beauty. 
But it was not the beauty of the curves that those creatures intended ; 
their utility, rather, if they intended anything (which they did not.) 
The bird’s curved nest. fits his body snug and good; and makes 
him feel well in his long broodings there in the woods. And the 
cell of the bee is good structure. Andsoon. As to intention, all 
that was in the God who made the creature and fitted him to do 
wise things without being wise. But even God seems not to have 
intended beauty in this matter so much as use; unless you go clear 
back and say—he made the bird in curves instead of rectangularly, 
because curved birds are most beautiful; and then having curved 
creatures on hand, inspired those creatures to fashion their homes 
to correspond. . But what I wish to get to is, that man alone among 
creatures has esthetic perception and sensibility. He knows a 
zig-zag when he sees it, and he does not like its look. He knows 
that certain colors do not blend and that others do. And the un- 
blended jar him. The blended affect him like music. He knows 
the difference between a space enclosed by an arch and a space 
enclosed by right lines, and evermore gravitates to the arch. It is 
of no account for the present, why he does it; I simply say he does 
it. And what does it mean that he is forever doing those things? 
Why did God make him in just that fashion? In order that he 
should eschew the Beautiful and turn it to no account in his own 
development, and make no use of it in the way of joy? Did God 
give hunger in order that we should never eat, and ears in order 
that we never hear, and feet for the solemn purpose that we always 
sit still? No, all constitutional faculties, love of beauty among the 
rest, are for something ; that is, to be exercised. 

Secondly, why has the Creator created such a delightful world 
and universe as this all about us? It looks as though he himself 
were a beauty-lover. Of course he is. Shall he make a beauty- 
lover—man—and not be in that respect like his man? Is that 
credible? If God does not like rainbows and the gracious sweep 
of horizons, and the sparkle of dewdrops, and the tinges, tints and 
celestial purities of skies, why does he flood such fairnesses forth? 
Also, why has he established that unchangeable mathematical basis 
on which musical harmonies repose, if he had not real interest in 
harmony. Then, too, why does he make this overwhelming appeal 
of created beauty to us, if he did not desire us to respond to it? Is 


ee 


YALE LECTURES. 225 


God aman that he should be a tempter, and lead his feeble offspring 
into that which must injure them ? 

Thirdly, why did he do a similar venturesome thing and impel 
his chosen writers of the Bible to walk abroad upon the creation in 
such unrestrainable delight in its beauties? The more he inspired 
them the more they put forth just that trait. When he left them 
alone to write honest history, in the exercise of their own honest 
faculties, there was nothing particularly esthetic, imaginative, poetic, 
ideal, tuneful, lyrical in their movement ; but the moment he filled 
them with his Spirit, for some transcendent spiritual purpose, they 
were lifted out of all that. Their language became cadenced, it 
was singing, they rhymed. Next, they filled their tuneful outflow 
with personalizations of the forms and forces of Nature, and with 
those personalizations they affectionately communed, as with very 
persons. 

Next, they filled all creation with God, and made it alive ; the 
thunders were his voice, the clouds and the thick darkness were his 
pavilion, the stars were his flocks which he led out shepherd-like 
—in short, their utterances were supremely beautiful. Poor old | 
Jacob when he was dying, had no natural strength to make a poem, 
even if he ever had; but he did make one, and the way he luxu- 
riated in the images of Nature was wonderful :—what he undertook 
to describe was far away and transcendental, not physical; but un- 
consciously his vocabulary was concrete, naturalistic and imagina- 
tive to a high degree. Judah, thou art a lion’s whelp, said the 
prophetic old man ; Issachar, thou art a strong ass, crouching down 
between two burdens—Dan, thou art a serpent in the way, an adder 
in the path, that biteth the horse’s heels, so that his rider shall fall 
backward—Naphtali, thou art’a hind let loose—Benjamin, thou art 
a ravening wolf—Joseph, thou art a fruitful bough, even a fruitful 
bough by a well, whose branches run over a wall. But it was that 
_ predestinated and preeminent Son, Judah, upon whom he most laid 
out the strength of his seership, and most affluently covered with 
his imagery. Perhaps we cannot minutely interpret all his words, 
but listen to the sound of them ; Judah is a lion’s whelp ; from the 
prey, my son, thou art gone up. He stooped down, he couched as 
a lion and as an old lion; who shall rouse him up? The sceptre 
shall not depart from Judah, nor a lawgiver from between his feet until 
Shiloh come, and unto him shall the gathering of the people be. 
Binding his foal unto the vine, and his ass’s colt unto the choice vine, 


226 7 YALE LECTURES. 


he washed his garments in wine, and his clothes in the blood of grapes : 
his eyes shall be red with wine, and his teéth white with milk. What 
a luxuriant effusion! How instinctively when God’s Spirit was flood- 
ing him he ran forth into God’s world, its exuberance, its freshness, 
its exhaustless multiformity, its pure beauty, for his materials of 
expression. 

And coming down to the New Testament it must suffice to say 
that our Lord himself evidently had a deep satisfaction in the fasci- 
nations of Nature, and did not hold himself back therefrom. I 
plainly hear the beating of his heart towards all beauty, in such a 
passage as: ‘‘Consider the lilies how they grow; they toil not, 
neither do they spin; and yet, I say unto you, that even Solomon 
in all his glory, was not arrayed like one of these.””’ No man could 
make that comparison between Solomon and the lilies, and so praise 
their array, whose eye and feeling were not at the moment saturated 
with their beauty. I have heard that sentence—‘ Consider the lilies,’ 
sung so often and with such impressive sweetness, that I cannot dis- 
sociate it from the music ; and am liable therefore to find in it heart- 
warmths and many things that are of the music rather than of it—- 
the influences of such associations being very insinuating and subtle ; 
—but I chose rather to think that music has done in this case what 
it is able to do, and was designed to do, in all cases where it carries, 
explains upon and unfolds divine themes ; namely, it has but taken 
me into the otherwise undiscoverable profundities of the words of 
Jesus ; it has given me to hear the flow of their inner melody, it 
has told me how he felt when he spoke as he did. 

My exegetical commentator on the passage, informs me that 
the language indicates that Jesus, when he said lilies, did not mean 
lilies in mass, or the genus lily, but that he fixed his attention on the 
individual lily. Well, I knew he did without being told. My music 
which I have heard seemed to tell me as much as that. A general- 
ized love is a good thing, but a love that individualizes is much more 
fervid and touching. When the word, Consider the lilies, springs 
from a specific observation of lilies at the moment and a brooding 
on them one. by one, it needs music for the rendering of its whole 
precious sense, 

But I return to my question, if beauty has no great and useful 
function, why did God, when he inspired men to write, set them 
revelling in it as he did? 

Fourthly, still speaking of things that I find in the Bible, please 


YALE LECTURES. 227 


tell me why God commanded that the place where he was to be wor- 
shiped by his people Israel should be such a very fine place? 
There was goodly architecture, as good and costly as could be at 
the time. There was great carefulness of ornament—carefulness 
and cost. The whole matter was specifically laid down and en- 
joined ; a hanging, a touch of color, a socket, a nothing-at-all (as 
we should say), as precisely and imperatively laid down as the 
Mercy Seat and the Cherubim in the Holy of Holies. And then, 
inside of all this glory, a ritual was forever to move on full of cir- 
cumstance and decorum, more circumstance and carefulness, three 
times, than was necessary to any ends of use. Itisthought by many 
in these days that beauty is too much of a beguilement to be let 
into God’s house and service. It tends to materialize the mind. It 
leads off into sensuousness. It fixes our attention on things that 
can never save the soul. God’s service has come to be a spectacle 
—a physical spectacle—in the Roman Church. And how can that 
be avoided, if you multiply physicals, and set people rejoicing in 
their eyes and their ears. Well, what people were ever more facile 
in getting themselves out of spirituality into sense, and even into the 
bottomless ditch of carnalism, than the Jews; unto whom God 
appointed architecture, ceremony, beauty, pomp, spectaculars and 
so on? Why was he not more cautious? If esthetics are a 
spurious element in religion, essentially and eternally; or if while 
not necessarily spurious, the bearing of them is bad practically and 
on the whole, human nature being so perverse that it can turn a 
good thing into a curse, any time,—how could God institute that for 
his Jews, that external religious system to which I have adverted? I 
am glad that he has given us such a full account of it as he has, so 
that we may know for certain and forever, how far art, beauty, orna- 
mentation, cost, sumptuousness, gorgeousness, sublimity and the 
rest, may reasonably go, in helping religion. Of course all the arts 
when they start out to benefit religion, in any given time, place 
nation or Christian body, must be wise as serpents in adjusting 
themselves to said time, place and people. We Congregationalists 
do not want any Holy of Holies, nor any High Priest, nor sprink-. 
lings, nor incensings, nor arks ; but we may well have as much as 
these in other forms suited to our rather austere and perhaps grim 
peculiarities. Speaking of grimness, I can recollect the time when 
to me, the young son of a Methodist minister, the Congregationalists 
were the grimmest thing I had yet ever heard of. We did not call 


228 | YALE LECTURES. 


them Congregationalists, my Father and I, no, we called them Cal- 
vinists ; a word of terror much more than the other—as indeed it is 
to this day. Well, when Beauty undertakes to prepare something 
fitted to Calvinists, she must look out for herself and not be too 
orate. The glory of Solomon and his temple are too much of an 
array for them. Calvin himself would endure a more elaborated 
externalism than these his children. The building where he preached 
so long in Geneva, was and is quite a building. And the liturgy 
that he used was quite a formal instrument of worship. Either one 
of them would almost shock a Calvinistic congregation back in one 
of our steadfast hill towns, with their weekly Lord’s day extempori- 
zations and their right-angled edifice with its undimmed white light, 
its white paint, its green blinds and its dear Puritan memories. 

I know the stock argument against all this that I have been 
saying, in regard to the decorous and decorative aspects of the 
Israelitish system :—it is said that a new era came in when Jesus 
came, he being opposed to those foregoing indulgences in the 
sensuous, and desirous that the interior and the spiritual should now 
come to the front and have its day. No doubt there is a grain of 
truth in that view. And that grain of truth is exactly this, that 
while under the old order, all such things as institutions, ceremonies, 
seemlinesses and beautifications, were secured by objective com- 
mand ; under the blessed order of this Messianic period, objective 
command has gone into comparative disuse, and in lieu thereof we 
have what the elder world never had, the indwelling Holy Ghost, 
the first gift of the ascended Lord, to set all things in order in the 
Church ; all things I say ; doctrines, polities, rituals, clerical orders, 
religious art, everything you can think of—which subjective method 
is inferior to the old one, as letting in a more or less occasional 
fallibility, the old one being precisionism made perfect. For ex- 
ample, there was absolutely no chance for the builders of the taber- 
nacle or the architects of the temple, to mistake God’s desire 
touching the structure thereof at any least point, or as to any least 
touch of adornment ; nevertheless, the new method, the method of 
the Holy Ghost, operating in souls and in the Church to get things 
done, is, beyond all expression, an advance on the old one as 
respects the supreme things to be secured—as much in advance, 
for aught I know, as the anti-typal Lamb of Calvary was an advance 
on all preceding sacrifices. My Brethren, there was never a great 
teacher or founder on earth who was less an institutionalist, in the 


ST 


YALE LECTURES. 229 


sense of personally instituting things, reforms, systems and all sorts 
of exterior elaborations, than Jesus ; but there was never on earth 
an institutionalist so prolific as he, in the sense that from him and 
his resurrection life, carried into individual souls through the Holy 
Ghost, institutions were to come—institutions, rituals, arts, litera- 
tures, laws, philosophies—a prodigal outflowering, wide as the 
world and as perennial as the tree of life by the “pure river of water 
of life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of the throne of God and of 
the Lamb.” Ah yes! he is the tree of life. All earth-born growths 
roust wither. Only the fruitages of the Holy Ghost abide. Even 
the arts, that have no supernatural root, are perishable,-or wherein- 
soever they survive they serve a distinctly second-rate use. And if 
you ask me what I have to say in respect to the perpetuity and the 
eternal monarchy of Greek art, this is my answer ; that in so far 4s 
Greek art, at any period, or in any instance, was the product of relig- 
ion, it had in it that condition of longevity on which I insist ; and 
in so far as it was not, but was moved by a finite impulse, and con- 
fined itself to a finite range, while it is the best thing of the kind the 
world ever saw, I suppose, yet the kind is secondary, and it were 
possible to show that, adding together all the elements of transcend- 
ent art, such as technical ability, formulative power, noble aims, 
profound feeling and wealth of ideas, Christian Art is immensely 
the queen over classical ; and whatever may be the value of classical 
models (and certainly it is very great), if Christian Art does not take 
. the lead by far, as a factor in modern civilization, the reason will 
be, that too many Puritan folk contrive to get themselves born— 
persons, that is, that do not see all sides of the salvation which is 
provided for modern life. 

I was speaking of the era of the Holy Ghost; of its fallibility 
as compared with the old era and of its superiority, nevertheless. 
It would take me too far out of my way to expand that matter, and 
forestall all possible misapprehension of what I have said. I donot 
deny that the great Teacher laid down some objective standards. 
Certainly he did. Still, it is true, as a general remark, that the work 
of formulation, doctrinal, institutional, ritual, ecclesiastical, esthetic 
and all the rest, was left to men in whom the Holy Ghost should be, 
when the Holy Ghost had finally come in that phenomenal coming, 
which made all prior comings so inconclusive and incomplete that 
Jesus could freely speak of them as no comings at all. 

I come now to my fifth head of argument against what, for the 


230 YALE LECTURES. 


sake of convenience, I have called the Puritan urgency for the di- 
vorce of beauty and religion. I hope I shall not use that word 
Puritan so often as to create an impression that I have an uncon- 
genial and unbrotherly feeling towards the people referred to—for 
I have not. For rhetorical purposes, I want to use them. And 
they are sucha stalwart folk that they can bear a good deal of using 
—and even unjust use. They are inured to it, for generations. 

But fifthly, I say :—that idea mentioned some time since, that 
over and over again, in the history of the world, the highest develop- 
ment of the Beautiful has coexisted with a low state of religion, and 
that therefore, the Beautiful, speaking by and large, is not only not 
nourishing to religion, but probably withering, I would like to make 
head against still further, by several running remarks, thus: if secular 
education tends to keep men out of the criminal class, as the statis- 
tics of that class do prove that it does, and as we should natur- 
ally expect it would ; is it not likely that the influence of beauty, con- 
sidered merely as a secular force now, would also have a good moral 
bearing? And again, how often do we see persons of the highest es- 
thetic development, who at the same time are sound, strong, inflexi- 
ble and sweet religiously ! - I have in mind now a man whose piety is 
a most admirable compound of staunchness and tenderness, a man 
who would rise to martyrdom on a fair call with absolute spon- 
taneity,—all the moral grit of his New England progenitors is in him 
undiminished—so much so as to be a matter of remark—and yet it 
is almost an amusement to notice how intoxicated that heart is in 
the presence of the goodly scenes of Nature, how sometimes his 
soul within him willalmost liquefy before a choice painting, and how 
a use of language, in a public speaker, for instance, that is terse, pat, 
vital, full of noble intention, and in supreme art, will give him so 
much pleasure that he can hardly utter his feeling. These instances 
are common enough on earth, my Brethren. And in every great 
public emergency that comes up, like war after a long period of 
peace, culture and easy living, during which a great many men and 
women have given a good deal of attention and interest to the em- 
bellishments of life, or life in its esthetic aspects, and have come to 
be considered dilettante, unrobust, lisping, people of the rosebud and 
perfumery order—so considered by the uncultivated multitude—be- 
hold, these supposed man-milliners and fashion-plates, these enervate 
creatures, these New York Seventh Regiment ornamental men, go 
down to the field of death as gallantly and cheerily, and with as iron 


YALE LECTURES. 231 


a manhood as though they had never once seen a picture ora party, 
or a fashionable coat with a rosebud in the buttonhole thereof—side 
by side they go with the men of the shop, factory and farm, these 
sons of culture, these emasculates, facing all things of peril and en- 
durance. How very often that is so. Often enough, at any rate, to 
show that the influence of high civilization is not necessarily de- 
grading and enfeebling. 

Consider, once more, that aside from material beauty, we have 
no images wherewith to represent the beauty immaterial, the beauty 
of a thought, the beauty of an intellectual structure (as an essay ora 
discourse or a poem), the beauty of innumerable beautiful feelings and 
the beauty of holiness. It cannot be that material beauty is debauch- 
ing, or that it is so far dangerous that we had better keep away from 
it, when all these beautiful, holy and precious interior things— (the 
things of the soul for whose preservation beauty external must be 
shunned, it is thought)—cannot be at all formulated and put into cir- 
culation, except in the use of the material, the physical, the sensuous. 
The deep subject of language I cannot enter ; especially as I did try 
to enter it when I spoke to you last year and had some points to carry ; 
but how far does one need to enter it to discover the divine use of 
beauty as a vocabulary for the soul? When I look at the eternal 
whiteness of a far-away Alpine summit, I call it holy and awful in its 
holiness ; but that only means that yonder immaculate mountain-head 
is an image ; a suitable and therefore ordained image of a certain su- 
preme moral quality in God, angels and men. Some Sybarite, be- 
holding that Alp, may not be moralized by it ; it is even conceivable 
that he may simply turn it in among his luxuries and there stop ; just 
as many a Church goer makes the means of God’s grace to be a savor 
of death to his miserable soul ; but that is not the fault of the Alp. 
The Alp is all right. That snow is holy. So holy that many of us 
are nearly heart-broken while we stand down in the valley and look 
up at it. Down in the valley! Sure enough, there we are. In the 
valley of unholiness ; cleansed by the washing of regeneration, per- 
chance, but not stainless—and yet not hopeless quite, because from 
skyey heights out infinitely beyond the utmost Alp, there comes to. 
us a word of hope, saying, ‘Though your sins be as scarlet, they 
shall be as white as snow, though they be red like crimson, they shall 
be as wool.” Isaiah understood imagery, and he knew that white 
is one of God’s chosen soul-terms—a touch of the sensible whereon 
there plays forever a touch, a glory of the supersensible. 


232 . YALE LECTURES. 


And so I might move through the entire creation and find 
everywhere the moral and spiritual. The creation and we stand 
over against each other in an appointed, detailed, wonderful corre- 
spondence. It was my privilege last year, in my lecture on the 
Vague Elements in Language, to show how even the infinite may be 
effectively set forth in finite contrivances of expression. And I 
doubt whether any impression of the infinite ever received by man 
is wholly void of a moral element. ‘The infinite, at any rate, is 
serious, grave by its very size ; and when you get as far as serious- 
ness, you cannot be far from the border-lines of the moral. Now 
the sweep of curved lines is one of the ways of indicating the infinite 
—not the sweep of circles, because they are too full of the intima- 
tion that they get around and come full circle by and by ; the moment 
a curve completes its curve and joins, it becomes a finite image ; but 
these curves that curve slowly and take forever to get around, are, 
to our feeling, as though they never did get around. For a thing 
that moves on and moves on and never stops moving, that shadows 
forth the infinite for us; and all my experience is that when I get 
upon such a journey as that, I feel pretty solemn, and as though I 
wanted no reprehensible thought or emotion to come into me. 

A similar moral or semi-moral effect can be wrought upon us 
by the skilful use of colors; and it is the very divinity of pictorial 
art that it can do such things. Many landscape painters understand 
all about this. And a painter does not amount to much unless he 
does. He who paints a bare boulder even in simple definiteness— 
that is, in an exact, cold reproduction of its finiteness, has abused 
the boulder. What did that boulder ever do that entitles it to such 
treatment! Nobody ought to be painted in his utmost literalness. 
That is knowing him after the flesh, as St. Paul expressed it. A 
human face should be painted suggestively. A face at any given in- 
stant, at the instant, say, when the artist is looking at it in order to 
paint it, has a certain kind and amount of expression, but that man 
there sitting to be looked at and painted, has in him quantities of 
kinds and amounts of things, not present in that one moment, or 
one hour, of that face. ‘Therefore it is an exceedingly fragmentary 
and insulting performance to paint him as he then is, and have that 
pass down to all generations, as the man. It is not the man. It 
requires a very roundabout exploration to know aman. Moreover, 
when you do know him, in his actualities, you have no right to paint 
him so. If we all had in us nothing but our actualities, we should 


‘ 


aS LS 


YALE LECTURES. 233 


be small affairs ; and hardly worth painting. Our potentialities are 
the greatest thing about us. That is so even with heathen men. 
But since Jesus has come and: redeemed men, their potentialities 
have been greatly enlarged and manifolded; and they must be 
painted accordingly. Paint a man at his best ; not only as what he 
has made himself to be so far, but paint him according to what he is 
germinally, and what he may be when those precious germinals have 
received the whole stimulation of the grace of God. In other words, 
idealize him. Or, in still other words, make a little show of the in- 
finite in him, here and there. Those who love the man will applaud 
your fine veracity in the matter, your ideal veracity, if nobody else 
does. 

So the boulder, so anything. Treat all suggestively. Spread a 
little warmth over your rock. Mellowit. Puta heart into it. For 
it is a curious and beautiful fact, that every visible thing has a heart, 
when closely studied ; like Alfred Tennyson’s tree that the maiden 
kissed and kissed and then kissed again, because she found a dear 
name cut on it; until the tree could stand it no longer but spoke up 
and said : 

Her kisses were so close and kind, 
That, trust me on my word, 


Hard wood I am, and wrinkled rind, 
But yet my sap was stirred; 


And even into my inmost ring 
A pleasure I discerned, 

Like those blind motions of the spring, 
That show the year is turned. 


Tennyson can hardly be charged with exaggeration here. Every 
thing has a heart. And there is nothing more admirable and whole- 
some in fine art, from the beginning, than modern landscape work, 
for the one reason that it has passed clear beyond the bewitching 
finitude of Greek achievement, into the deeper and more solemn 
witchery of a statement from the interior ; which statement of Nature 
from the interior is large, vague, vast and practically infinite, because 
it is from the interior ; or, in other words, because it takes Nature 
in its expression as having meanings, meanings intellectual, mean 
ings moral, meanings spiritual, meanings affectional. 

I was saying that as lines have power to suggest the infinite, so 
have colors. And how do they do it? In various ways. Please 
remember, I am trying to illustrate the thought that material beauty 


234 YALE LECTURES. 


cannot be, to be shunned, as some claim, because beauty supersen- 
sible, the different forms of soul-beauty, are not to be set forth other- 
wise than in terms of material beauty, or the beauty of the world ; 
and I have drifted into a cognate thought, by way of illustration, the 
thought that material things can represent to us and make us feel 
the infinite. Lines can do this and so can colors. Whena painter 
starts you down a vista that has no end, he has started in you the 
vagueness of the infinite. When a painter has hinted, but not painted, 
the depths of the ocean, he has done the same thing. When a 
painter, along his far away sky-line, has drawn a color-tone which 
says that beyond the horizon there, out of sight, sweeps a boundless 
stretch of sea, he has given into your soul the whole immeasurable 
suggestiveness of sea. Not even when you stand on the sea-shore, 
and look off, are you so immersed in the infinite, as when you mark 
that painter’s line of color. On the shore, outlooking, your eye 
reaches an horizon. To be sure, you do not stop there, still that 
horizon jars you and mars the full impression of infinity upon you 
from the endless waters. But in the picture, you see neither sea 
nor horizon, but the sea is suggested without a thought of horizon. 
Everything is left without boundaries. You have a statement whose 
main value is in what it does not state. These are some of the ways 
of impression open to the color-master. 

I have heard the superiority of classical art attributed to the 
finiteness of classical subjects. It is possible, it was said, to formu- 
late perfectly, as the Greeks did, ideas as limited as the Greek ideas 
were. But since Christianity has come with its glorious enlarge- 
ments, its many ideas that shade off into mystery and have their 
principal effect as being mysterious, the old-time, absolute Greek 
formulation—that has been the fascination of the world ever since— 
must be given up, of course, and art, as art, must take an eternal 
inferiority, it is thought. Why undertake to harness art to religion, 
when the chief contents of religion are essentially unstatable by art. 

That difficulty and some others, I may get at in another lecture. 
Meanwhile, have I not at least nibbled around the edges of it, in 
what I have said? . Modern art can state the large Christian ideas. 
It had better let alone trying to state the Almighty in a Vatican 
fresco of an old man. And a few more impossibles it had better let 
alone. But nine-tenths of all that Christianity has brought in, can 
be stated in a way to make about all the impression a human soul can 
bear. And even the Almighty can be set forth, if we cease from the 


YALE LECTURES. 235 


folly of bodily parts and just describe on the canvas the great works 
that so reveal him. I never look at the ocean or ata terrible storm, 
or at the sky of night, or at the mighty mountains of a land like 
Switzerland, without an impression of God that is practically 
infinite. And in so far as such things can be painted, God is made 
known art-wise. The modern machinery for embodying the infinite 
is good. 

I have spoken of lines and colors, but I have said nothing of 
music. And music is the one art that is most serviceable for the 
setting forth of those Christian ideas and experiences whose dimen- 
sions, and whose celestial qualities, are supposed by some to be 
unstatable essentially and forever. I say they are not. I imagine 
that music was born for that purpose, principally. What did the 
Greeks know about music, comparatively? Nothing. No, music 

was waiting for the Messiah and his kingdom. Waiting for the Holy 
Ghost to get into souls, and start there all sorts of mysterious com- 
motions ; penitences, exultations, aspirations, expectations, sweet 
loves, a whole world of life that the ancients did not know. Music 
waited for that; and when that came she came, last-born of God, 
with her hymns, anthems, oratorios and marvels many; marvels of 
composition not only, but marvellous new instruments, and instru- 
mental combinations ; instruments that almost articulate and often 
seem to know and be glad for the divine service they are in. God 
hasten the day when every Christian man shall know music. 


18 


THE SERVICE OF ART IN 
RELIGION. 


(II.) 


It is sometimes mentioned as a reason why art should never be 
invoked in aid of religion, that the very act of putting ideas or in- 
ward experiences of any sort into form, as in art, is deteriorating in 
its tendency to the man so doing and to all people who consent to 
commune with and enjoy his work. Ideas or feelings, if let alone 
and left to be in the mind simply ideas and feelings, are less danger- 
ous morally than they are if externalized, and especially if external- 
ized in terms of beauty. Perhaps if they were externalized in 
thorough-going ugliness, they would be less to be feared, but the 
moment they are charming or even pleasant, the trouble begins, and 
all concerned are demoralized unless they set a guard against the 
beguiler. Well, those of us who are conversant with Holy Writ, do 
not need to be told that the physical is quite an inlet of evil for men ; 
and even those of us who are simply observant of what goes on in our 
own selves, have come to know the same thing ; Holy Writ in this 
case, as in many others, being simply an authoritative statement of 
what is true and easily discoverable, Bible or no Bible. But if the 
Bible is explicit on the dangers of the physical, the external, the 
sensuous, it is equally explicit on the more subtle and vastly more 
unrelishable point that evil has its seat and all its potency in the soul 
of man, and not in externals ; so that ideas unformulated, unexternal- 
ized, unembodied, are not always such tremendously innocent things 
after all. Leave them alone in the mind and never speak them forth 


YALE LECTURES. 237 


in any form, and they would fester there and work corruption as ener- 
getically as you please. However, I am not disposed to insist upon 
that, to-day. It isso, but let it go. I grant that formulation has its 
perils. Formulation is the occasion—the occasion if it is not the 
cause—of religious degeneration in countless cases. It is claimed 
that it tends to degeneration in all cases. Well, admit eventhat. I 
do not feel myself compelled, in order to reach the ends I seek here, 
to resist the very radical statement, that always when tangible em- 
bodiment of soul-facts is attempted, whether in art or in anything 
else, a distinct moral risk is incurred ; and that therefore all the arts 
of expression are to be diligently watched. 

But now just notice a few plain things. First, that our Maker 
in giving us bodies, has indicated his wish that we should externalize 
and take the risk of it. He externalized us; then why should we 
not proceed to perpetually externalize ourselves in all kinds of utter- 
ance, pictures, sculptures, music, rhetoric, architecture, gesture, 
oratory: and in that ofttimes most affirmative and impressive of all 
utterances or self-embodiments, silence ; that fine-art which occasion- 
ally a silent man like Grant has perfected. A soul taken singly and 
alone is nota man. A man is an incorporated soul. There is a 
good deal of talk abroad about “saving souls.” Christ Jesus did 
not come into the world to save souls, butmen. And the gist of the 
scriptural doctrine of the resurrection is, that each man of us is 
saved in his totality—not a ghost but a man (which a ghost never 
was). Well then, if a man is not a man except as he is corpore- 
alized, neither is a thought a thought, nor a feeling a feeling, unless 
it is corporealized or embodied or formulated. I will show that 
more minutely a little farther on. For the present I assert it and 
say moreover, that whether that assertion be true or not, it is true 
that God’s creating us soul and body, points to, suggests and legiti- 
mates the bodying forth of our inner and spiritual selves in suitable 
forms ; such as our wit can devise and such as seem to effectually 
do the business for us. 

Further I wish to ask, how are we ever to have the least human 
intercourse, if we donot get out into these embodiments whereof. I 
speak ; into language, into painting, into music, into abiding struc- 
tures and so on? I sometimes notice that the horses in the field 
put their noses together and have a protracted season of silent fellow- 
ship. We have not yet come to that fine clairvoyance. Or rather, 
I should say that we are capable of silent fellowship, but have 


238 ; YALE LECTURES. 


numerous things to say for which mere silence is not enough. When 
a man’s wife is silent to him sometimes, it is a saying to him as much 
as he can stand at the time ; but in the long run of life our minds 
and our hearts get full of things that cannot begin to be expressed 
in the simple alphabet of silence. The horse is not so. His 
consciousness is pretty simple on the whole, I judge, and a simple 
language therefore answers in his case. Our consciousness has a 
hundred-fold more contents and more complexity and we must have 
a hundred devices of expression, some of them very complex. 
There is no intercourse, I say, if externalization ceases. 

But remember that only a part of our intercourse is with our 
contemporaries. I do not know but I have to do with the departed 
more than I have with the living. I read their books. I contem- 
plate their arts. I listen to their music. I sit still and absorbent 
under the venerable influence of their cathedrals and their memorial 
structures. I go to their graves and read the inscriptions over 
them. I go up and down the earth on pilgrimages to those cities 
where the precious: vestiges of them are particularly accumulated. 
But suppose these men and all the men of the past had been preju- 
diced against externalization, had not believed in memorials and 
vestiges and precious accumulations, but had consulted the horse— 
as Solomon said, Go to the ant—and had refused everything save 
the mutual touch of noses, so to speak. That would have answered 
a certain purpose for them, but not much of a purpose for us who 
want to recall them and realize them and get some profit from their 
experience. If each generation refuses to express itself, then every 
generation must make the experience of life entirely uninstructed 
by all past experiments. What an unaccumulative and unprogressive 
race the human race would then be, like to the very animals of the 
field. 

I was saying a little while ago, that as 2 man is not a man unless 
embodied, so a thought is not a thought unless embodied. And 
now look at that. 

On the sharp question whether the mind of. man can think 
otherwise than in forms of the outward—sense-forms—I am not 
anxious to speak; but on the question whether the mind does 
habitually and chronically draw on the external for its moulds of 
thought, anybody may speak who ever took the trouble to examine 
his own practice in the matter. We think in words, generally we 
do. Everybody does. It is instinctive with us. We were made to. 


YALE LECTURES. 239 


If all men breathe, they were made to breathe. And if they all think 
embodied thoughts God meant they should. But if my unexpressed 
thoughts are thus formulated in fact within me, and proceed in 
terms of structural coherency and logic, and in terms of beauty 
often ; behold I am already in the perilous trap of a practical 
externalization—interior and mental externalization. Perhaps I am 
not much degenerated by it; nevertheless there is a sense-process 
going on in me. I am in commerce with externals in the privacy 
of my mind. The matrix of my thought savors of the physical. I 
may comfort myself with the notion that I am particularly unphysical, 
because I have not put my thought into any form that can be touched 
with the hands; but I am deluded. Jesus went to the root of this 
matter when he taught that a man need not advance so far as an 
overt act in order to be corrupted, but that the instant a reprehen- 
sible thought emerges into his consciousness, the whole strength of 
corruption is in him. 

I say again: the instant I think a thought, the jeopardy of 
physicalization has begun, because that thought, following the cus- 
tomary process of human thought, clothes itself in a body borrowed 
from the outward. Metaphysicians sometimes fancy when they use 
language forthe sharp purposes of their particular business, that 
they have triumphantly purged their terms of the colors and flavors 
of the outward world. They have eliminated the physical, or at any 
rate, whatever physical there may be left in their words they do not 
use in their processes of thought. But language is loth to be expur- 
gated in that way. It was sense-born. It was physical in its origin. 
And it knows it and is not ashamed. So it holds on to its physical 
parentage. It holds on; there is an indestructible physical image 
in each word of it. The metaphysician may try not to have any- 
thing to do with that image, but the image is the vital essence of 
the word and when he is dead and gone and another generation 
come to read what he has left, often they hunt out his suppressed 
images, in order to get down into his real meaning ; the fact being, 
after all, that those images, those physical elements, did always 
secretly determine even that metaphysician’s use of language. There 
is a curious pertinacity here: a persistence as of a thing alive and 
wilful. 

I said at the beginning that I was willing for the sake of argu- 
ment to admit that there is in all cases a tendency towards an evil 
influence on men in all the arts of expression. 


240° YALE LECTURES. 


The moment a mind moves forth into embodiment, artistic or 
otherwise, it perils itself and everybody else. Let that be conceded, 
whether we need to concede it or not. And now it becomes very 
important to know what are our securities against that miserable 
tendency and especially in fine art ; whatis our security? Are there 
any securities that are so secure as to make it worth while trying to 
wed art to religion ever? I propose to answer that question. 

And first we must not undertake to get security by minimizing 
form, as the Congregationalists incline to do sometimes and other 
bodies much more. Form we must have on all accounts, and if we 
are to secure the ends of self-expression fully and the ends of impres- 
sion fully, we must have of form not a little. The fact is, in several 
denominations those ends are not secured with any fulness. One 
might make a good lecture on the exact points of short-coming 
among the Quakers, for example, in that regard. There can be no 
complete and symmetrical doctrinal development, except by a com- 
plete and symmetrical development of form. Neither can there be 
any well-balanced and full-toned development of the religious life. 
Indeed there would not be such things as denominations, with their 
contrary polities and their contrary theologies, were it not for the 
inadequate and fragmentary rituals and form-systems of the Christian 
bodies. ‘There would only be the Church Catholic, as there ought 
to be. I do not say that all men would think alike as to doctrine 
and polity, if they were all put into the discipline of the same forms ; 
absolute uniformity of opinion could never be ; but they would think 
alike so far, and particularly would be developed along the same lines 
and into the same types of religious experience so nearly, that they 
would have no heart for denominational subdivisions. I say sub- 
divisions to indicate my sense of the disgraceful multiplicity of the 
separated folds. I have heard many fine arguments to show the 
great value of denominations ; but in my judgment, all real values 
could be better secured in a Catholic, or universal Church. I did 
not know that once, but I have known it for some years now. We 
must not undertake to defend ourselves from the possible debase- 
ment incident to Form by any extreme abridgement of Form. 

Secondly, confining myself now to the arts that carry in them 
influences of beauty, I remark : beauty is safe enough always, and no 
one is morally relaxed by it when neither the artist nor the observer 
makes it an end in itself, but on the contrary, seeks ends intel- 
lectual, ethical and religious, and holds beauty strictly subordinate 


YALE LECTURES. 241 


and contributory thereto. I have struck now a fundamental 
chord in this whole matter. In any just and wholesome arrange- 
ment of the arts of expression, beauty is a subordinate element. 
And how do we know that? . By what considerations do we show 
that beauty belongs down there under those other things; and 
begins to be a dissolvent of character, directly it is let out from 
under the same? Comparing the moral and religious influence of 
simple intellectualism with the moral and religious influence of 
beauty, it seems to me there is not much choice between them. A 
man under the supremacy of intellectualism is as much a sinner and 
as much in hell as a man under the supreme rule of beauty. It does 
not seem so at first ; and if Jesus Christ had not come among us and 
given us the benefit of his awful stroke of moral analysis, we should 
never have got into this matter to any practical purpose. But he 
has come, and now intellectualism as the reigning purpose and joy 
of life has little to say for itself. It carries a man down always. It 
does not make him lackadaisical necessarily. On the contrary he 
may be exceedingly athletic and formidable. When John Milton 
portrayed Satan, he did not consider it necessary to make him a 
milksop nor to effeminate him at any point. He, Satan, was a very, 
gifted person, and what he could not do no finite creature could. 
But intellectuality, a life moulded, modulated and marshalled under 
intellectual influences pure and simple, is perdition in every essential 
element of perdition. How then does it deserve to be put above 
the Beautiful as a supreme formative force? | 

I reply, the Beautiful, if let alone, does work emasculation in 
the matter of simple-strength. It gradually kills the more strenuous 
elements in character. Itundermines heroism. A solid nationality. 
like the Puritan commonwealth cannot be built on it. Moreover I 
think it may be true that the Beautiful, as being more distinctly 
sensuous than the intellectual has amore direct affinity with practical 
sensualism than intellectualism has. I suspect that an examination 
of the facts of history, a reference to peoples and periods that have 
surrendered to the Beautiful, might show that to be so. So that the 
Beautiful does stand second to the intellectual as a good force in 
life. And it stands second to the ethical, of course. To settle that 
we have only to refer to the experiments made by individuals and 
by communities, with the ethical as a dominant factor of develop- 
ment. Let a man put his conscience and his religious nature of 
which his conscience is a part, in the ascendant, and what does he 


242 YALE LECTURES. 


come to? Asa matter of fact, what does he come to? What kind 
of a man does he make? And how does he feel within his own self? 
Is he a happy man? Do his faculties in him act as though they 
felt that a spurious king was set over them when conscience was 
enthroned? Do they not rather show an utter contentment and 
pull along in their own particular function, each one blithely, sing- 
ing even as the worlds sing, because they are marshalled so orderly? 
Also in every case what is the national result of an enthroned con- 
science? History has but one voice in this matter. On the other 
hand, what is the uniform consequence when such a faculty or impulse 
as vanity or combativeness or love of dominion or bodily lust reigns 
in a manoramonga people? The innumerable intermeddlings with 
the monarchy of the conscience and religion, by the several other 
powers of man, overwhelmingly settle the question of the de jure 
power. So then the Beautiful must abdicate. 

Or try the question in this way: Conceive the Beautiful as 
eliminated from the physical creation; would there be anything 
worth while left? Yes, we should still have structure and mass and 
utility. Quite an array of things solid and sizable; that is, if we 
include in the Beautiful only the esthetic conception. When we 
speak of structure, and of utility as resulting from structure, we have 
passed into the realm of intellectual beauty, to be sure, but we have 
not passed into esthetics strictly. A perfectly neutral universe, as 
regards esthetics, would be quite a universe, I say. So might an 
unesthetic man be quite a man, as is numerously proven every day. 
And a Deity too might be very adorable who did not love beauty 
and cared not to create a beautiful universe. But take from the 
Deity and from the man and from the universe every shred and 
semblance of the moral, or the intellectual, or the true, and what is 
there left? It would take a whole week’s thinking to determine 
whether we had anything left. Certain it is that what was left would 
not be worth retaining—even as a man when dead is no longer 
worth keeping. 

I propose to give now some concrete illustrations of an undue 
surrender to beauty. And as I havea company of embryo preachers 
before me, I will begin with the sermon. A man starts out to make 
a beautiful sermon. That is what he is after. I am ashamed to 
have anything to do with such a person, even for the purpose of 
illustration ; but as such persons occasionally appear, and particu- 
larly as any preacher (especially a young one) is liable to be caught 


YALE LECTURES. 243 


in a temporary passion for the beautiful some day, and to get up 
discourses accordingly, I think I had better take hold of the case. 
Well, the beautiful sermon is started, and I will tell you what the 
man will do. He has already surrendered all intention of utility or 
usefulness. The homiletical impulse has vacated and the esthetical 
impulse has come in. A man who has come along so far as that 
may be looked to to do anything. First he proceeds to forget 
that the first beauty of a discourse—the first chronologically and the 
first logically—the beauty in fact without which no other real beauty 
is possible—lies in organization, and is not sensuous but intellectual. 
When God would make a beautiful man, he provides a frame for him, 
not any frame, but a frame that will hang together and be specific, 
a man’s frame, not a brute’s, and a frame not only that will hang 
together, but will hang together creditably, proportionally ; no one 
member too long for the rest, or too short for the rest, or too heavy 
or too light; a skeleton which when clothed on with flesh will be 
seen to be beautiful and will pay for all the fleshly decoration. To 
decorate a malformation would be incongruous. Every malformed 
man, if he could have been permitted to put in a single word before- 
hand, would have said, ‘“‘ Please omit decoration and give me a 
form.” I should like to be decorated and formed both, but if that 
is too much to ask, as between the two give me form. And that 
sermonizer ought to feel in the same way, but he does not. He 
wants decoration ; decoration irrespective of the frame ; decoration 
whether there be any frame or not. 

As I.am upon the subject of beautiful organization, [ might as 
well say here, parenthetically, that I know of no one rule for secur- 
ing it so important as this. Take the good of your congregation for 
your aim ; not merely their general good, but their specific good 
through this subject you have chosen; get your intention high up 
in that way; clarify it; simplify it; state to yourself exactly what 
you are after ; and then shape your materials, organize them hero- 
ically on that objective. And it will require some heroism. Your 
fondness for this and that in your accumulated material, will make 
you want to put itin. It is something you have labored on and 
dug out perhaps ; or it is a scrap of learning; or there is a glitter 
of the ideal in it that pleases you; or it is a touch of pathos which 
might melt somebody. There are numerous temptations and you 
will need to be a hero and ask only, does that item bear naturally 
and directly on my objective? Moving among the heaps of good 


244 | YALE LECTURES. 


stuff that you have got together, in that constant, courageous self- 
denial, you are apt to develope a plan of your subject that is simple, 
coherent, orderly, compact, with an all-engulfing trend, like the pull 
of a raceway; a veritable organism, a thing of beauty indeed— 
intellectual beauty. You did not aim at beauty. You aimed at use 
and God rewarded you for it by carrying you unconsciously into 
beauty, as he always does. 

But our man whom we left a moment ago, does not propose to 
waste himself on such plain work as that. He does not choose to 
get beauty unconsciously, or to put up with a kind of beauty so little 
obvious to the multitude as beauty structural. If he can only get 
flesh, real pink flesh, something pretty and posy-like, he will run the 
risk of the frame. Well, it is an instructive fact that even posies 
have to have something to grow in or on. In order to satisfactory 
ornament, there must be something to ornament. Ornament con- 
sidered as an independent beauty-spot, is one of the most ineffective 
and ridiculous of things. Omament—ornament legitimate and 
telling—is simply and always the natural and spontaneous efflores- 
cence of structure. How that one definition damns scores of ambi- 
tious art-works, sermons, buildings, paintings, musical products ! 
It is a truism in architecture that all adornments must be congruous 
to the buildings that they undertake to adorn; a rule which I 
expressed in the essence of it, when I said adornment is structure 
efflorescent. That is, there must be so perfect harmony between a 
building and its decorations, that it is as though, and makes one. 
feel as though, the building had blossomed. The congruity in 
question lies in several particulars. ‘The ornaments must be suitable 
to the intention of the building. A gothic cathedral must not be 
called upon to blossom into ungothic or unreligious or pagan embel- 
lishments. Also the ornaments must be suitable to the structure of 
the building ; and to its position and surroundings; and to some 
other things perhaps. But I must not get too far away from sermons. 
However I am not far away when I am naming the laws of congruity 
in art. For example, a sermon may be gothic or Moorish or Greek, 
or of the New England meeting-house type. Christianity is pretty 
diversified in its aspects and contents and admits a good variety of 
sermons, but Moorish embellishments on a gothic sermon, or Jeremy- 
Taylorisms festooning Jonathan Edwards, were grotesque. Anda 
Moorish sermon at a funeral were scarcely the thing. | 

When it is once settled that a discourse is to be a sermon, a 


YALE LECTURES. 245 


multitude of beautiful things are ruled out. That one decision 
excludes them. Were it a political speech or a Fourth of July Ora- 
tion, or an address of courtesy or a military proclamation or a nuptial 
discourse it would be different ; certain flowers might then be let in, 
which now must be foregone, and even an occasional spangle might 
not be offensive. But the precise point I wish to press just now is, 
that when the sermonizer has made the structure of his discourse 
‘beautiful he has virtually provided for every other beauty of pulpit 
utterance that is suitable and is possible tohim. ‘The mind that has 
the grace and the vigor and the moral purpose to organize such a 
structure as I have described, will find always as it moves along in 
the process of amplification upon that structure, that those .very 
mental qualities which originated the structure, do also joyfully 
originate all along the decorations thereof; congruous decorations, 
of course, because structure and decoration are the issue of the self- 
same mind ; the fine purpose in the man, that presided over his 
’ work of organization ; the purpose to do a definite good to a certain 
congregation, by the use of a certain subject, on a certain occasion. 
That purpose also presides over his entire movement through the 
subject when he comes to write it out, and infallibly selects suitable 
details of beauty, if indeed it be proper to say that he selects at all. 
He does not. No, out of such a mind as that, agitated by the work 
it is in, beauties spring of themselves. The man does not call them ; 
he simply ferments in the stress of ncble endeavor, and they come. 
As he is but partially sanctified at best, and but imperfectly disci- 
plined and cultured in his intellect, the probability is that some 
things will spring out of him that are more sumptuous than suitable ; 
heavy dabs of color that need to be reduced, heavy tones that do 
not harmonize with the general flow of his music; ramping, sudden 
growths that spoil the proportions of his landscape ; spurts of energy 
that spurted before he knew it ; but such a man as he, will certainly 
see these things and go back upon them with a swift vengeance. 
He knows that a mere detail has no business to be springing into 
the foreground and attracting all observers, even if it be a bewitching 
detail in itself considered—it cannot be considered in itself; it is” 
but one thing in a great whole, and when one thing in a great whole 
sets up to be considered by itself, it has outraged the whole; in 
proper subordination and congruity to the whole it can make its own 
valuable addition to the solid effect of the whole. Perhaps:no one 
can detect that contribution, but it is there ; even as in a perfectly 


246 | YALE LECTURES. 


blended chorus the most peeping voice tells to a mathematical cer- 
tainty, though no mortal could find thesame. But an insubordinate 
detail is a practical nuisance. It nullifiesa sermon. ‘That is, its 
whole effect is towards nullification. And when a sufficient number 
of insubordinate details assemble themselves in a sermon, with a 
conceit of their own fascination, a sermon is unshapely and spoiled. 

And the man who starts to make a sermon that shall be beauti- 
ful, lands just there ; in no sermon at all, but in a miniature of what 
the universe would be, provided structure and structural melody were 
ignored all through it and the Creator had directed his undivided 
attention to sensuous beauty-effects. By the way, I suppose that 
word beauty, if we are going to be strict and further our own con- 
venience in the discussion of beauty, should be confined to sensuou 
impressions and not be permitted to include any supersensible reality 
whatever. However I have shackled along so far without confining 
it,and possibly I can go on so to the end. By my reference to the 
sermon I have now illustrated our great means of security against 
beauty. It must be subjected to that intellectual thing, truth, and 
to that good thing, religion. Artists must go for intellectual and 
ethical ends supremely and for esthetic ends secondarily. And 
Churches and Christian denominations must seek art for moral ends 
and not just for the luxury and the ravishment of beauty. 

Take it in architecture. First, certain utilities must be thor- 
oughly made sure in a Church edifice. The building must accom- 
modate the assembly. It must not be built in a way to tumble 
down, either the day of dedication or any other day to come. The 
materials must be as indestructible as is convenient and they must © 
be put together to stay. The space enclosed by the walls must be 
convenient for the particular uses of the people who built them. The 
possibility of seeing and hearing must be attended to. Then again, 
in a building to be used for God’s service, as that building is, every 
visible thing must be real. ‘There should not be pretended cornices 
and pillars and architectural effects accomplished by hypocritical 
frescoes ; which frescoes are supposed to be most satisfactory 
according as they most nearly succeed in deceiving somebody. But 
after all these points of construction, utility and moral honesty are 
covered, the question of beauty comes in well. 

May beauty come in? May art have a chance? The masons 
and the carpenters and all the utilitarians have had their chance or 
are to have, and now is there anything more? May we put any cost 


YALE LECTURES. 247 


on that building, over and above any conceivable utility, and make 
that cost simply an offering to Him? Will He feel like rejecting 
our precious ointment, if instead of selling it to convert heathen, we 
wastefully pour it out in that pious way? Moreover inasmuch as 
this building is for the one end of personal salvation, can we further 
that end by some efforts now that are artistic? Is aman saved as 
much as he might be when he is simply converted, or even sancti- 
fied? Is it any good to have his converted and sanctified soul 
refined? A refined saint seems to be more current in the world 
than an unrefined one. If you are about to come to close quarters 
with him, marry him for instance, you like him refined. If you are 
going to transact business with him, or do anything with him that 
brings you near enough to catch his insensible emanations, his mag- 
netism as it is sometimes called, the more refined he is the better. 
You have no prejudice against his holiness or his good principles, 
but if in addition to that he is civilized, you have no objection. 
There is no such civilizer as regeneration by the spirit of God, taken 
in its effect, both direct and remote. That is so. Still, a person 
civilized to the extent of being regenerated, may for the time being 
be austere, uninformed, in part unmodulated and unrelishable. 
Therefore is there any way by which the Church building where he 
fondly worships can be turned in upon him for purposes of culture, 
and at the same time not retard his piety ? 

First of all, knowing as we do the rather stiffening effect of 
right lines, supposing we try curves on him a little, in the construc- 
tion of the building. You get that man travelling along a curve and 
he has got to be graceful. Curves have insensible emanations as 
well as men, and the insensible emanations of a curve are very con- 
genial and very improving, as compared to the insensible emana- 
tions of a zig-zag. Also if this curve that has taken hold of this 
man, winds off into mystery, as curves often will, that will do no 
hurt. That being led off into mystery may be an advantage to his 
present square-cut and realistic make-up, it may be, even modify his 
theology. It need not injure or alter the substance of his theology, 
but around that substance it may throw an atmosphere which, while 
it might not make much of a show on Fairbanks’ standard scales, 
could easily be as valuable to this man as though it did. And then 
there is what John Milton has called a dim religious light, meaning 
to intimate, as I understand, that the light in question is religious 
because dim ; though of course, as was also intimated by this same 


248 YALE LECTURES. 


Milton, the light gets a part of its religiousness from the fact that it 
is strained through 
Storied windows richly dight— 

through windows, that is, that have some sort of religious story to 
tell, and tell it ornately, in colors. Supposing we experiment on 
our man with that. Probably he is a strenuous and. busy person all 
days, save Sunday, and cannot in the week be caught in that leisure- 
liness of mind which is quite necessary to a full and deep impres- 
sion upon his sensibilities by any good and Christian story. But 
here now in his pew he sits, with his work laid aside, with his best 
clothes and their silent culture on him, voluntarily offering himself 
to be impressed. ‘To be sure, he mostly faces towards his minister, 
determined to receive impressions from that particular quarter ; but 
when a man is intent in one direction, looking out his front door, all 
his side and back doors are so much the more exposed ; just as 
people are run over by watching approaching trains more often than 
in any other way; the train they are not watching then gets its 
chance at them. Multitudes of people you cannot run over except 
as you get them looking out for a particular train. For example, 
there is many a hater of art and beauty in Churches, who has it for 
his established principle to watch the minister and repudiate the 
gothic or other fine architecture all about him as he sits, and the 
storied windows and the heavenly preaching of the choir; but I say 
unto you, verily, his side and back doors are exposed, and to such 
an extent that after a few years he is not the man he used to be, as 
some accidental test applied to him shows. 

It is proposed to abolish the choir and to have congregational 
singing ; and to his own surprise and alarm he discovers that he 
does not wish that to be done. Or his artistic edifice wherein he 
has sat so long burns up, and the disheartened and economical 
congregation are inclined to put up now that infinitely reiterated, 
unsculptured and unbedight edifice wherewith we are all familiar, 
when lo! he finds himself going over to the mystical Babylon again 
and advocating her fornications. He is thc victim of insensible 
emanations. He knew that his preacher emanated. He always 
knew that. That is the preacher’s avowed business. But he had 
not known that all these other influences were emanating ; that the 
Gospel, when preached in a white-light interior, is not the same 
that it is when preached in a dim religious light, that dim religious 
light being also supported and carried home by the numerous other 


YALE LECTURES. 249 


esthetic blandishments which are apt to characterize a Church 
interior that has ventured along so faras to invoke the aid of stained 
glass and blazoned holy stories. ‘The Gospel remains the same in 
whatever light, as regards its substantial grandeur, tenderness and 
efficacy ; but remember always that the Gospel may be received by 
a person in two modes: first, by eruption, secondly, by saturation. 
And when you come to that second mode, these esthetics that I am 
describing get their chance. 

Even preachers may be divided into two great classes, the 
irruptive and the saturative, the last getting their saturative quality 
largely by their culture, their tone, their art-quality, their likeness to 

- storied windows and religious architecture and the sanctified com- 
positions of the great tone-masters of the world. Some four years 
ago, when I delivered a lecture here on our Congregational worship 
and proposed some enlargement of ritual among us, the late Dr. 
Bacon, who was present, said that I had been spoiled by my Upjohn 
Church. Which was only what I am now saying, that the saturative 
form of impression is one of the forms, and a strong one too. I 
wish my Upjohn Church had got at me fifty years ago and that my 
constitutional irruptiveness had had fifty years of chastisement. As 
it is, I must irrupt, more or less, so long as I live. However I have 
come at least to recognize the other more silent and gentle process, 
the process saturative, and to be willing to speak a word to you in 
its behalf, as I am doing this day. I do not know that I should feel 
that I had risen to the full size of such an occasion as this if I should 
spend my whole hour expounding so small a detail in the general 
subject of beauty and its influence, as a dim religious light ; still I 
have noticed that an entire large topic is often contained in some 
single one of its elements, even as a tree is completely discovered 
in its smallest leaf. Just let a man discuss the storied window ques- 
tion clear to the bottom, and he has broken the back of the whole 
difficulty in the matter of esthetics and religion. It is frequently 
taken for granted that these elements of impression for which I plead 
—the art elements—are not so much elements of impression or use, 
as elements of fancy, entertainment and enjoyment, and are not 
worth considering strenuously, on that account. But it is not so. 
Take that inconsiderable circumstance, the storied or colored win- 
dow, as an illustration. The light thus secured has the following 
not at all trivial recommendations. 

It sequesters an assembly seven times more than does an untoned 


250 VALE LECTURES. 


light, that is, it makes them feel that they have left the street, shop 
and home, the flow of daily and common life, and are now shut in 
with God and things divine. Next, itimmerses them, unperceivedly 
perhaps, but none the less on that account, in the mysterious ; that 
feature of religion which saturates the sensibilities as profitably as 
any other feature, it may be. At any rate no one has taken the full 
stress of his religion till he has felt the touch of its mystery. Blessed 
be anything that helps bring that about. Next,so much of dimness 
as any reasonable interior is likely to have is promotive of mental 
tranquility ; that one thing most necessary to get, before a man’s 
religious privileges begin to soak in very much. That is physiology 
in part. The eye here must have repose, the rest of shadow, before 
the mind can have repose and the mental receptivity thereof. Ido 
not understand however, that this mental advantage of shadow rests 
wholly on physiology ; I fancy it is an ultimate fact of the human 
mind that dimness inclines one to meditativeness, brooding, senti- 
ment and movements of the soul far-out and away. Behold the 
genial influences of the night. The numerous staring visibilities of 
the day are then withdrawn. They no longer occupy the mind. 
And with that the numerous noises of the day are hushed. And 
thus released, the intellect no longer operates as simple intellect, 
but the sensibilities are called in. A man’s deeper self and his 
honester self and his tenderer self and all his better and choicer self 
comes forward and begins to play. Therefore the night is a rare 
time for lovers, as has been immemorially understood. And just as 
rare a time is it for piety to expatiate upon its holy and nourishing 
themes and search out its waters of comfort. It is a time for remi- 
niscence too ; a time, in fact, for everything sedate and mellow and 
saturative. So then, a sacred interior that borrows a little of this 
same night-witchery, has done a good thing. It has prepared an 
atmosphere, a mental atmosphere, wherein the Gospel can do its 
very best. For the Gospel has not done its best when it has simply 
laid down its propositions. ‘Those invulnerable propositions do not 
more need to be uttered forth in and through a vibratory medium, 
the air, than they need to go forth through what I will call an 
esthetic medium, made up of the impalpable influences of softened 
light, strong and refined architecture, truly religious, chaste and 
rational decoration and an order and movement of service harmo- 
nious with them all. 

It may occur to some of you that Christianity is an essentially 


YALE LECTURES. 251 


cheerful religion, and is imposed upon therefore when domiciled in 
any the least sombreness, such as dim lights and gothic effects. I 
think we shall come to the truth in this matter, if we take one look, 
fair and square, at Him who is Christianity impersonated. God 
forbid that we should call him uncheerful. But God forbid also that 
we should call him cheerful in the same sense that birds and squir- 
rels are, or even the ancient Greeks, who have so filled the world 
with their incomparable happy art. Jesus was aman of sorrows and 
acquainted with grief; not alone as bowed down under a heavy 
Mediatorship which reached its climax on Calvary, and then melted 
away into the flow of a great triumph; but as essentially, constitu- 
tionally and forever a chastened person. Go back to that date in the 
dateless eternity when the triune God alone was, and why was God 
not even then what for lack of a better word I will call. chastened ? 
What should we think of a Being who, standing at that point, con- 
templating the fact that his own good and blessed nature made it 
incumbent on him to originate by and by such a universe of contin- 
genicies and shadows as this universe of ours, could be otherwise 
than toned by it? Go forward also to that forthcoming and eventual 
date when that apostolic word, “ Where sin abounded grace did 
much more abound,” shall have been completely fulfilled, and the 
whole groaning and travailing creation shall have been brought out 
ofits pain into the glorious liberty of the children of God ; the best 
time, on the whole, the creation ever saw: and even then there 
will be something not unlike a minor chord in the universal re- 
joicing. Even as Hillhouse meant to hint, I suppose, in that hymn 
of his where he addressed the angels who never fell, and said to 
them : 


Earth has a joy unknown to heaven— 
The new-born peace of sin forgiven. 
Ye, on your harps, must lean to hear 
A secret chord that mine will bear. — 


That reminiscent element in earth’s final joy, the remembrance 
of sin, will eternally differentiate it from all other joys, and it is 
impossible not to believe: that the enthroned Jesus, gone victoriously 
to the right hand of God, in his undiminished and unchangeable 
humanity, will evermore be something other than he would have 
been, other in his feelings, other in the entire play of his soul, by 
reason of what he has passed through; and also by reason of the 

19 


252° YALE LECTURES. 


tremendous fact that in spite of all he has passed through, hell is 
not yet obliterated from the map of the universe, and if our ortho- 
doxy be true, never will be. 

My Brethren, gothic architecture, with its seriousness and 
grandeur, its sombreness, as some would say, is an inevitable influ- 
ence from Jesus of Nazareth. The Greek templeisnot. The Greek 
temple is not formulated on a serious back-ground. Greek archi- 
tecture is not the product of spiritual struggle. Once in a while a 
Church building committee, caught by its historic renown and 
deluded by the idea that grave architecture may come to be weari- 
some if profusely repeated, proceed to set up a Greek form to wor- 
ship in; just as painters and sculptors sometimes think they have 
chosen their best possible subject when they have selected some 
figure or scene from classical mythology and have laid themselves 
out on that—on some pagan Deity, some Bacchus, some Faun, 
some Mercury or some Venus. ‘The truth is, we have Bacchuses 
and Venuses enough of our own, if it is important that art should 
keep on in that way. But really and soberly, when you come to 
religion and religious subjects, I humbly venture the remark that 
Christianity need not knock under to heathenism. We will take 
what is good, refined and great in the classical civilizations, and 
make what use of them we can; and we will even borrow ideas from 
their sacred buildings ; but Christianity has developed an architec- 
ture of her own; an architecture severely chaste, moral and sublime 
in its fundamental tone, but quite capable of being warmed and 
illumined with sober touches of cheerfulness, by various devices not 
necessary now to specify ; touches superimposed on that solid founda- 
tion-tone. I do not know anything much simpler than the great 
cathedral at Cologne, so far as its interior structure is concerned. 
I shall never quite recover from those unsculptured stone pillars that 
there bound the nave and stretch away into the upper spaces. The 
whole moral strength of simple lines is there developed. But there 
is a great glory of windows in that edifice, that for one thing ; and 
when in 1872 I attended an early morning service there, and the sun 
in the east inundated all, and especially the sufficiently adorned and 
beautified choir-space, where the service headed up; I felt that I 
never saw such a combination and sweet mutual interfusion of sub- 
limity and beauty; the sublimity made mellow and melodious by 
the beauty, and the beauty made strong, unenervating and moral by 
the sublimity. I am not here to be fanatical and say that any the © 


YALE LECTURES. 253 


least departure from the gothic type in Church edifices is unpardon- 
able ; but as I am taking time to show how the Beautiful may be let 
into religion, without letting in softness and debility and ultimate 
demoralization, to wit, by subordinating it to the supremacy of the 
true and the ethical, I do like to insist on gravity as an underlying 
quality of the architecture of the Church—gravity, that great tone 
‘which so comes into the gothic, for one. Let gravity be made sure, 
and certain sane and robust things implied therein; and the florid, 
the sensuous, the artistic will not be likely to run away with us. 

It is like what I said about the sermon ; make sure of structure ; 
get into you the true structural spirit, and the decorations will come 
along inoffensively and in right measure. 


ORDER IN SERMON TOPICS. 


Gentlemen, we learn by the mistakes we make; that for one 
way ; but when a man has spent a half century or so making mis- 
takes and getting wise in that expensive manner, he turns to those 
who are young, with a feeling that they ought to learn by his 
mistakes and not be at the miserable expense and waste of time 
of working out a great list of mistakes of their own. Hence this 
constant procession of lecturers through this desk, men covered all 
over with the scars of their mistakes and desiring to tell you where 
each scar came from, and how they might have avoided it as well as 
not had they only known what they now know. Each lecturer 
is seized with a deep fear, now and then, that you will all go straight 
along to make mistakes for yourselves and that nothing short of 
actual decapitation will stop you; and yet none the less does 
the lecturer’s heart within him yearn to lecture, I notice, just as 
though there were some good in it. Well, perhaps there is. If the 
universal desire of man for immortality rather indicates an actual 
immortal life, may it not be that this universal instinct to lecture, on 
the part of gentlemen rich in mistakes, is a hint that men as young 
as you are benefited by being lectured—one in a dozen of you, at 
least. 

These thoughts, pro and con, came to me as I started out 
to prepare for your benefit the warning in black and white which 
lies here before me now. A particular, clear warning which no 
man happened to deliver to me when I stood where you stand. 

My Brethren, on a given Lord’s Day, a minister preaches on 
a certain topic, and on the next Lord’s Day on a certain other 
topic, and the next day on another; and so on so long as he lives. 
But what determines the succession of those topics? Do they 


YALE LECTURES. 255 


cohere by any coherency however attenuated, or do they stand 
each one in absolute cut-off from everything before and after, like a 
solitary island in mid-ocean? Probably there is some sort of 
coherency in the business: so much at least as prevails in a string 
of beads which, although they are not in a very vital connection 
and cannot be said to hang together, are at least hung together ; as: 
the cord on which they are strung very well knows; but is the 
preacher’s coherency intentional, methodized, bottomed on princi- 
ple, and therefore persistent and uniform? Probably not. “Mine 
never was. And so far as I could tell, most of the preachers whom 
I knew were just like me. They had come out of the theological 
seminary with no thoughts at all on the subject, and they skittered 
along accordingly. ‘That was a whole generation ago, when things 
were darker than they are now, and young men had more facilities 
for not knowing everything than they have at this present time. 

I shall distribute the material of what I have to say to you now 
in regard to the succession of the- preacher’s topics, most con- 
veniently for myself and most conveniently for you who must listen 
to me, if I remark; that all conceivable laws for methodizing this 
succession classify under two heads, first, laws subjective, secondly, 
laws objective. That considerably threadbare terminology, subject- 
ive and objective, is so convenient that one dislikes not to use it 
occasionally. If it were not convenient it would not be threadbare. 
Roads that most accommodate the public want are those that have 
the grass all worn off, of course ; and their bareness is their glory. 

Let-us in beginning consider the subjective laws of before and 
after in pulpit topics. They are such as the following: First, you 
may get your themes and the succession of them from the abso- 
lutely unregulated impulse of your own individuality. Years ago I 
was about to marry a certain eminent gentleman whom you all 
know ; and the appointed hour had come and he and I were in 
a room by ourselves composing our minds for the event, presum- 
ably ; and presumably rehearsing our parts for the impending cere- 
mony. Not at all, Gentlemen, not at all. He was discoursing 
to me with all his might on a certain very remote intellectual 
subject, as though marrying and giving in marriage were already 
over with and ended for this world, and we were all like the angels. 
“‘ My friend,” said I, interrupting him at last, ““do you not wish to 
know what particular ceremony I am about to use?” “No, Mr. 
Burton, I am not one of these stereotyped men, you know. Follow 


256 | YALE LECTURES. 


your own genius, and it will be perfectly satisfactory to me.” Well, 
sermonizing may go in that way. ‘The preacher opens to his 
congregation the special matter that he does open at any given 
time, because he, the preacher, is exactly the man that he is. 
If he had happened to be a different man, he would have opened a 
different subject. That is the whole explanation of what his people 
get that day. A most precarious state of things, one might say. 
Being fed by ravens were not more so. 

Secondly, a preacher may follow the impellings of the Holy 
Ghost in his own soul, and may have it for his rule that his theme 
shall be given him, every time, supernaturally. He refuses themes 
gotten by study, or human conversation or any sort of public or 
private hearing or seeing. He has no objection to study or to 
the voluminous say-so of authors, conversationalists or lecturers ; 
but when he comes to that one and critical act of selecting next 
Sunday’s discourse, he proposes to just empty himself of all mortal 
accumulations, and take in only sky-born things. A beautiful atti- 
tude that. And a fruitful one, too. For the Holy Spirit has no 
aversion to souls thus heroically made empty. On the contrary, he 
delights to enter such; and when he is once in, he is delighted 
to find there, after all, great’ treasures of honest accumulation ; and 
out of those treasures to pick topics for the man’s use and mark 
them sometimes so that he can know them. Almost all preachers 
—all real preachers—can tell of experiences they have had in that 
line. Not more was the stock and stuff of prophecy given to 
the Hebrew prophets, than the substance of sermons is given 
of the blessed spirit to men now, over and over. These then are 
the two, great subjective laws of choice, as regards our subjects. 
They are chosen in a supreme individualistic impulse, or they 
are chosen as chosen for us by the Holy Ghost. 

And now a word as to the objective laws of choice. 

First, the minister may move about much among his people 
and quietly hunt his themes in their hearts and lives. Being their 
minister rather than another people’s, he naturally wants to preach 
to their necessities ; their necessities are his subjects and his great 
business is contact with them, with a view to know them and make 
his discoursings touch their case, Now that is pastorly and sweetly 
Christian in the intent of it: moreover it is oratorical, for the 
power of oratory lies one-half in adjustment at the moment to the 
assembly in hand. The abortiveness of misadjusted oratory and 


YALE LECTURES. 257 


the death-sweat to the speaker himself, if he is sensitive enough to 
have a death-sweat ever, is often a recollection for a life-time. 
This pastorly preacher whom I am now describing, not only hunts 
hearts and lives from house to house and along all the ways of life, 
with a view to suitable discourses, but he watches from afar and in a 
general way; peradventure, the public mind of his parish may 
be moved by a common wave of feeling, by some occurrence 
of common interest, as a conspicuous and impressive death, or 
a startling accident or a great crime or a special jubilation ora 
presidential. election or an earthquake or an outrageous heresy 
or a crusade of the women of the community. Many things 
happen; and the pulpit can rehearse them, or if it does not 
exactly rehearse them, it can shape itself to them in the abstract 
discussions of truth that are full of application to the present situ- 
ation. Of course, there is no coherency in such subjects as they 
comeion one after another; but then there is rio coherency in the 
successive interesting events wherewith they deal. 

To be sure, the sensationalist has his special glee in pulpit 
topics based on present passing phenomena in this way; but a 
decenter minister than the sensationalist may also get his topics 
thus, considerably. On the whole, it does seem rational that a 
public speaker should indicate somehow that he knows what partic- 
ular world he is in and what the present, passing circumstances are 
wherein he stands and speaks. “I speak to posterity,” said a cer- 
tain disgusted member of Congress, when his fellow members 
did not incline to listen to him ; and we are all familiar with Charles 
Lamb’s account of Coleridge’s getting him by the button in the 
Strand, in London, to talk to him at length on a favorite philo- 
sophical subject. . Lamb says that he took out his knife and cut off 
that button that the absorbed philosopher held by, and went his 
way for the day; and at night found Coleridge on the same spot, 
going on as briskly as ever. Well Brethren, it is not best for 
preachers to be too much absorbed in present and transient circum- 
stances, but we had better, on the other hand, not preach to 
posterity alone, nor to the empty air. I can recollect the day when 
I prided myself that my pulpit interest, for me, was drawn from 
my subjects, so that in that respect I did not care whether I had 
many to listen to me or not, or whether my congregation had all 
cut off their buttons and left. That was going too far—as | think 
now. 


258 | YALE LECTURES. 


But secondly now still dwelling on topics selected on object- 
ive principles ; a minister may take this for his rule; he will spend 
half his year, the winter, for example, in sermons directed to revi- 
valistic ends, and the other half of the year in sermons that shall 
have a wider range and bear on culture and edification, That is a 
simple path and numbers there be that enter thereat. 

Thirdly, we can formulate a complete system of doctrinal 
topics, and take our people through a wholesome round of theology, 
year by year; that for Sunday mornings. Then in the second 
services we can move more miscellaneously; making free with 
all subjects the more freely, because we have piously observed our 
appointed routine of the morning and given the hearers a sure loaf 
to masticate: the centre and substance of a full divine meal. That 
plan has one virtue for certain, namely, itis a plan. It makes a 
preacher consecutive because doctrines are consecutive; and it 
tends to make consecutive Christians in the pews. The people are 
insensibly methodized under that treatment, and they grow to be 
knowing and systematic in religious truth. 

Again, preachers may follow the recorded career of the Lord 
in their sermonizing ; or lastly, they may do what comes to much 
the same thing and take the order of the Christian Year, as laid 
down in the liturgies of the Church at large. I run over these last 
specifications rapidly because I shall get back to them again, and to 
all my specifications, when I turn back in my subject and consider 
the desirability of these subjective and objective methods. And first, 
the methods subjective. Let me give them a rapid run through the 
mill once more and point out some of the chaff and grit in them. 
Take the doctrine: “Just follow your own genius,” as the great 
doctrine for preachers. No doubt a preacher of that kind will 
be likely to be full of flavors, to be marrowy and real; and con- 
sidered simply as a galvanic battery, he may be first-class. But 
-a personality formulated on the principle of individualism, as his 
has been, is likely also to be circumscribed, lop-sided and more or 
less eccentric. A man who has so much respect for his own interi- 
ors as to make them the law of his pulpit subjects—the law of their 
selection and succession—has reached that advanced stage of 
self-respect by an individualistic course of education as distin- 
guished from a catholic education. That is, in his choice of books, 
lines of study, methods, teachers and everything else which has 
gone in to make him what he is, he has supremely followed his own 


YALE LECTURES. 259 


genius. In preserving his own precious individuality and standing 
guard against influences that might obliterate or enfeeble it, he has 
kept out influences that would have universalized him and made 
him an organ with several hundred pipes, instead of a solitary and 
eccentric bagpipe. Now a bagpipe in the pulpit tends to make bag- 
pipes all around. I do not know anybody who more needs to . 
be an organ than a preacher of the Gospel. The Gospel is as 
capable of innumerable tones and tunes as the vast atmosphere is, 
if only it can have a many-piped man to tone and tune through: a 
man who is an organ and nota pipe. I do not now dwell on the 
disadvantage that the preacher himself suffers when he is a pipe. 
No, what I object to is the multiplication of pipes and pipers 
among his hearers by his being what he is. They take the fashion 
of his doctrinalism and his spiritualism and his entire limited cul- 
ture. As though a deformed man should inflict his type on the 
whole community. This highly original preacher whom I am 
deprecating, not only selects his topics and their order by the law 
of his own originality, but he selects his Scriptural lessons for 
his pulpit and his hymns by the same law; and the prayers in 
which he leads his congregation are simply self-evolutions once 
more ; they are his experience and his circumscribed religious 
thinking spoken forth, and the bowed congregation must conform 
themselves to that unique pattern, or else not pray at all. Usually 
they do not pray at all, but watch that interesting evolution. The 
danger is that they will come to like watching it and to supposing that 
to be prayer, and to feeling that prayers which are catholic rather 
than individual are tame and formal and maybe not acceptable 
to God. 

I wish I had time to illustrate at large the evil of following 
your own genius too much. I am afraid you will laugh at me when 
I tell you that at Easter 1884, in early April, 1 began to write and 
preach on the Resurrection of our Lord; and on that theme 
and its branches and corollaries staid, steadfast and rooted till the 
last Sunday in July—four months— averaging more than one sermon 
a week on it and writing on nothing else. I presume you will 
charge the bagpipe infirmity on me. I could explain and defend 
myself partially, at least, but I will-not. Rather I prefer to hasten 
on and say, that I can refer you to scores of important Creeds, 
Church Creeds, Creeds of theological seminaries and denomina- 
tional Creeds, in which the Lord’s resurrection is not mentioned 


260 YALE LECTURES. 


at all, and nobody would know from them that he did rise, save by 
inference or implication. And that although. the doctrine of the 
life of the risen Lord, communicated to dead human souls by the 
Holy Ghost, to make them alive, is the doctrine pre-eminently 
that differences Christianity from all other religions. Now is not 
that playing something less than full organ? Those Creeds are 
very resounding on the passion of the Lord and on some other 
themes, but they pitifully die away on that one event which is the 
forth-flowering of all preceding events. We needa speaking pulpit 
which is not limited by the private genius of the man in it, a pulpit 
that discusses topics that any given private genius might forget, or 
touch too lightly, if he were not made aware of them and attent 
by the voice of the Holy Catholic Church; the godly wisdom 
of the whole Kingdom of God; the teaching ages; the Holy 
Ghost in the ages. The preacher who goes by his own genius, 
does not much hear this great teaching. He has picked up some 
things—some great things probably—and on them he puts his 
whole weight. ‘They suit his mind. He can preach on them 
con amore. On other topics he would be listless. So he abides in 
these his specialties. I must work the truths that I can work, says 
he, and what other truths there may be must be worked by men 
who are born to it, as I certainly am not. And his people, instead 
of sitting at a full table, sit stintedly at his; and bear the stamp of 
his specialization. So much for that. 

And now, how about getting ovr sermons by the direct gift 
of the Holy Ghost? Will that do? Shall I open this particular 
thought or text to-day, because the Holy Ghost operating in the 
secrecy of my mind, has authentically designated that subject for 
this day; and shall I insist- on that as the rule of my selection 
always? No. And why?. For various reasons. To begin with, 
God has confessedly provided various externals for the guidance of 
men; the Bible, for instance ; and human advice, and his provi- 
dence working on the large theatre of history; and ordinances 
which are practical digests of information; and the teaching 
Church. I do not. need to name all of them, but if there is only 
one—just one—the Bible, say—that one is conclusive to the point 
that God did not intend men should walk by the inner light simply. 
And I do not know but the same thing is indicated quite as clearly 
by the fact that men are made of soul and body, and not of 
soul alone. Why am I clothed upon with this external outfit with 


YALE LECTURES. 261 


its several outlooking organs, by which I am related to the vast and 
multifold external and am perpetually externalized—why all this, 
except as my Creator wanted me to lead a double life, and be 
doubly directed in all that I do: first, by the blessed Spirit, no 
doubt ; but again, by authorities exterior to myself! Moreover, 
why is it that, while the operations of the Holy Spirit in souls are 
certainly favorable to sanity, sweetness and discretion, the forth- 
puttings of the persons thus operated upon are frequently neither 
sane, sweet nor discreet—why is this unless God means to notify us 
that a man must not go by interiors alone? The Apostles and the 
first disciples were full of the Holy Ghost and of power, even 
the power of the Holy Ghost, as they needed to be considering 
the tasks they had on hand ; but this fullness of the Spirit did not 
save them from error always, and was not meant to. They had 
differences among themselves in respect of the things of the King- 
dom, wherein both parties could not be right, although they were 
re-born of the Holy Ghost. Mary, the blessed Virgin, was much 
inspired when she improvised the Magnificat; so was Zacharias 
when he chanted his Benedictus; but both of those God-given 
hymns are strictly nationalistic rather than universalistic and 
Christian, and it took quite a long time to get even the Apostles out 
of a nationalistic conception of the Kingdom of Jesus Christ. It 
is difficult to speak of all this without seeming to disrespect the 
Spirit of illumination, the light of God in the mind; but we must 
speak of-it, otherwise men all about will be undertaking to go 
by the Spirit of God and nothing else. Evidently the Spirit does 
not wish any such thing. He enters them and then yields to their 
ignorance and persistency and lets them blunder. A ship all sail 
capsizes. Sails and good gales are good, but. ballast is good too. 
And when God’s gales are on us, the gales of his Spirit in the mind, 
we must steady ourselves by the ballast of authority and by the 
wisdom of that same Holy Ghost embodied in the Book, in 
Christian history, and in Christian institutions, notably the Church. 
The secret of equilibrium lies in a due balance of the outward and 
the inward. 

You see now, my young Brethren, why I cannot advise you to 
get your sermons from Sunday to Sunday by any merely subjective 
law of choice. Well then, how shall you get them? They must 
come somehow, for the Sundays come and the congregations come 
together. If the ministers were all. Joshuas, every now and then 


262° YALE LECTURES. 


- some sore-pressed soul of them would be halting the sun, stopping 
the Sundays and taking a rest in his subjects ; but the Joshuas are 
all dead and gone; and no preacher ever escaped the next Sunday. 
Brethren, I do not think we need to escape it. Subjects are as 
numerous as Sundays are. And while I would not lay down a too 
strict and iron rule for getting subjects, and locating them, one 
on this Sunday, and the other on that; I have slowly settled to the 
idea that, for an outline of our march through the year, nothing 
is better on the whole, perhaps, than the life of the Lord chrono- 
logically followed ; as it is followed, indeed, in the Christian Year 
laid down by those Christian bodies which give attention to such 
things. At any rate that may do for one outline. The life of the 
blessed Lord, I say, beginning with the Advent and ending with the 
Ascension ; and yet not ending there, for his invisible career is 
a part of his human career as truly as his birth was. The Man 
Christ Jesus, that veritable man, in his humanity intact and undi- 
minished, has gone up to the right hand of God, has sent forth 
thence the Holy Spirit, and now waits till his enemies be made his 
footstool by that Mighty Spirit! In even just mentioning this out- 
line for sermonizing, I feel my heart caught in the warmth of it and 
made glad. 

The first advantage secured by such a course of preaching 
is, that it sweeps the entire circle of Christian truth, and does 
not leave the minister and his people exposed to the perils of a 
partial and unbalanced cultivation. A man who had never exam- 
ined the subject might say, and would be likely to say, that a 
following of the life of Jesus in our sermonizing must result in less 
breadth and less variety than some other plans: the plan of a 
doctrinal curriculum, for instance. Are there not large parts of 
Holy Writ that do not get treated by us in our pulpits provided we 
simply run the round of the Christian Year ; such as the civil legisla- 
tion of Moses, and many a report of battles, and numerous touches 
of personal portraiture, and a great many religious hymns in the 
Psalms and elsewhere which have not the remotest reference to 
Christ ; and any amount of national history too in the Old Testa- 
ment? I reply, of course, the Bible in its entirety, and not in 
selected parts is our text book. We must be careful on that point. 
The whole educated world has come out of the notion that all parts 
of the Book are equally profitable to be preached upon, so that 
a minister must take for his topic Paul sending for his cloak to 


YALE LECTURES. 263 


Troas, as often as he takes the sending of the Holy Ghost, and so 
often as he preaches on the cloak must be just as enthusiastic as 
though the Holy Ghost were his theme. Nevertheless, the whole 
Bible, cloak and all, is to be turned in and utilized when we speak ; 
and if it cannot be utilized on the Christian Year plan, then that 
plan is conclusively exploded. But consider now the following. 

| A loving student of Christ and his career will find himself 
carried, by that study, into an amazingly large fraction of this 
volume :—carried by a movement direct and inevitable. ‘The most 
unpromising portion in which to find him is the Old Testament, 
but the moment we accept the Old Testament record as organically 
one with the new, and admit that the day of the Messiah was 
preluded and introduced by a gigantic preamble, a long-continued 
toil of miscellaneous forces which were systematized and made co- 
efficient by the blessed purpose of God running through the whole 
thing, and converging the whole to the Advent ; and admit further 
that the Old Testament is our authentic history of all that ; we have 
implicitly declared the presence of Jesus in innumerable places in 
the old record. He was the outcome of the ages and to interpret 
him we must search those ages. And while we shall find him very 
obviously manifested in numerous events, personages, institutions, 
prophecies, and allusions back there, we shall as truly find him in 
still more places: Psalms, histories, sentences, incidental utterances, 
and what not, wherein no mortal at the time suspected any other 
meaning than that meaning constrained by their time and locality. 
If God chooses to elaborate a terminology full of present signifi- 
cances and then thousands of years thereafter, in thé providential 
unfolding of events, makes that old terminology carry vastly 
expanded significations, which significations it is now plain enough 
that terminology was designed to carry, if God pleases to take that 
way of gradualism, and would not have his Old Testament speak 
forth all its contents till the fullness of time ; who are we that we 
should undertake to criticize him; and why may we not better 
thank him that we are privileged to explore a Book so germinant 
and phenomenal? 

And so the New Testament. If Christ and his life is our 
appointed circle of topics, to be sure we must resort primarily 
to the histories of him given by the four Evangelists ; but hardly 
more to them than to the Epistles, those inspired expositions of the 
very things we are after concerning the Lord. If I am speaking on 


264 . YALE LECTURES. 


the birth of Christ or his circumcision,.or his baptism or his temp- 
tation or his transfiguration, or his death or his resurrection or his 
ascension, or on any scene in his life or any slightest word that ever 
fell from his lips, my experience is that the whole volume begins to 
swarm about me; not every passage of the whole, perhaps, but 
there is such a swarming that I feel as though every and each were 
swarming, precisely as the Samaritan woman said, “Come, see a 
man that told me all that ever I did,” because Jesus had told her so 
much in the few words he did say, that she was sure of his ability to 
tell more, and felt that already her entire secret consciousness had 
been opened out. If you press me hard, and ask me at what point 
in the Christian Year I am accustomed to bring in Paul’s cloak, 
I answer, I bring it in when I bring in the man that wore the cloak. 
And if you ask me where I bring him in, I answer, I can bring him 
in wherever his life connects with Christ’s life, or even with the 
Kingdom of Christ. It is not straining matters much if when 
speaking of Christ, I speak of one of his Apostles, especially such 
a sizable and interesting Apostle as St. Paul. Moreover, how that 
little accident of sending for the cloak helps light up the whole 
early situation, the exact situation wherein both Christ and all his 
friends found themselves. The truth is, we depend on trivial inci- 
dents for a large part of our information whereon to build an histori- 
cal and realistic conception of the day of Jesus and his co-laborers. 

I should say here, that if there are some parts of the Scriptures 
that cannot be directly connected with a life-long round and round 
of Christ-sermons, as perhaps there are, those parts can certainly 
be drawn upon and made of use in the way of illustration and 
enrichment for the Christ-sermons—and I suppose it was one of the 
special designs of God in getting the Book written, to have it used 
in that way. A preacher with eyes on all sides of his mind, may 
and will use material collected from the whole breadth of created 
things and human life ; but his pre-eminent storehouse is the Bible. 
The Bible has more contents than any other book. And it has 
more of God in it. And it was more intended for moral and relig- 
ious use therefore-and for homiletical material. 

I said to you at the beginning that in laying down the circuit 
of the Christian Year as one of the most serviceable of circuits for 
the preacher to follow, I did not mean to be more than cast-iron on 
the subject, and I therefore desire here to slip in the suggestion, 
that if only we traverse that circuit in one thorough-going discourse 


YALE LECTURES. 265 


each Sunday, we have fulfilled all righteousness perhaps, and made 
sure of a roundabout education and indoctrination for our people ; 
and on the numerous other occasions when we are called to speak, 
may spread abroad upon such topics as do not come into a follow- 
ing of the life of Jesus—if any such there be. I doubt whether 
there are. I wish this body of students would appoint a committee 
to hunt for some and let me have the list they make out and see 
what I think of it. If I cannot find a scene in the life of Jesus, or 
some sentence that he spoke, or something else directly connected 
with him, that will make a natural text whereon to unfold every 
object on that list of yours, young Gentlemen, then I will give up 
the case. But supposing I cannot. Suppose there are numbers 
and numbers of good, preachable subjects that do not easily get 
into the cycle of the Christian Year. I should say march through 
the Christian Year, that for one thing; make sure of that—and 
then right along parallel to that substantial movement, just march a 
more miscellaneous and unforeordained movement, skirmish-work, 
Zouave-fighting, hitting things as they fly: such as the last earth- 
quake, Paul’s cloak, politics, dress, the theater, the social evil, 
Ecclesiasticism, the advantages of celibacy on the part of the more 
poverty-stricken and roaming of the clergy, anything you please ;. 
only, my Brethren, you will always notice that the Christian Year 
kind of preachers never want to discourse on equivocal or unper- 
missible themes. Their constant companionship with the Lord in 
the round of his life disciplines their taste and sharpens their 
hunger for themes full of Gospel fatness and gusto, themes that are 
not scrappy and remote and queer. 

At the same time they will not be narrowed and made monoto- 
nous by this companionship with the Master, in their prescribed 
round of discoursings. When Dr. Horace Bushnell had served his 
people twenty-five years, he preached a sermon to them, afterwards 
printed, in which he said that some of them had complained that 
he preached Christ too much and did not range through as large a 
diversity as a preacher reasonably might. He defended himself a 
little, but I presume they were right. At least they had an idea 
which they were feeling after. Never did there live a more versa- 
tile man than he, in the constitution of his mind ; he was -wonder- 
ful in that regard ; but for various reasons, the heavy attacks made 
upon his orthodoxy among the rest, he had labored supremely upon 
certain aspects of truth and had partially retired other aspects. 





266 : YALE LECTURES. 


Some subjects he not merely did not discuss, but took no 
interest in; important subjects, too. Various things that quite 
fascinated a ritualist, he simply despised as topics for a strong man 
to consider. The continuing and undiminished manhood of the 
ascended Lord, he esteemed a small matter, apparently. The vari- 
ous questions that center in the atonement enthused him mightily 
and pervaded his sermonizing to any extent for'a long time ; but it 
would have been better had he widened his sweep by something 
like this on which I am this day insisting: a selection of his 
themes of discourse, not by the accident that his theological stand- 
ing at certain points had been impugned, nor by the accident that 
he had become a Congregational minister ; nor by that primary and 
fundamental accident, his being born with an Olympian head and 
with steam on from the first, so that he could create full-veined 
subjects for himself, as the profuse prairie creates flowers—in no 
such ways as these could a man like him, or any other man, in 
truth, be widened to his utmost and made all-including in respect of 
topics: but rather by some external, authorized curriculum, put 
upon him as a bondage at first, if need be. It does not hurt these 
giants to harness them and make their huge strength move along 
roads that former generations have laid out; it is interesting to see 
them canter across the open fields and disport themselves in simple 
exuberance ; and it makes the rest of us proud that one of us is 
thus exuberant and gigantic—but when you come to solid use—or 
to the greatest solid use—why let us have them harnessed ;_har- 
nessed into some objective round ; the Christian Year, for example, 
or even into some of the other objective systems which I have 
named ; the yearly course of doctrinal sermonizing for one. 

I do not mention Bushnell as a pre-eminent sinner in the 
respect named, neither have I the heart to emphasize against him 
anyway. He is only one of hundreds of us. I myself am one of 
this wicked class naturally. Some subjects I like and some I dis- 
like ; and if I do not keep watch, I preach all the time on the 
former. And I select Scriptures to read to my people that I like, 
and do not at first see, perhaps, what some parts of the Bible were 
written for at all. Of course, my pious intention is to preach on 
everything that deserves it ; and to do it proportionately ; dwelling 
on the uplifted Cross more than I do on the Roman soldiers at the 
foot of it; but I am like the converted Indian who was put to trial 
before a police court for whipping: his wife. “I forgot,” said the 


YALE LECTURES. 267 


poor fellow ; and when 1 as a preacher come to look back over any 
year of my preaching, or over a stretch of years, I notice that I 
“forgot” all along and followed my nature too much, rather than 
my solemn good principles in the matter. 

Many of us are carried away by the special rages of the period 
in which we live, or of the nation to which we belong, or of our 
denomination or of the local community where our home is: and 
we preach more than we ought on those rages: on the rights of 
man more than on his obligations, (how natural that is in an Ameri- 
can !), on individualism more than on solidarity, (how natural that 
for a Congregationalist !), on Church organization, apostolical suc- 
cession and the force of sacraments, more than on doctrine and 
life (how natural that for a ritualist!), on the love of God more 
than on his holy rigor (how natural that in this day!), on sins 
against the social state, like theft, lying and adultery, more than on 
the sins that are purely spiritual and an injury against God. 

Now as a corrective of all over-specialization, all disproportion, 
all narrowness, all provincialism, denominationalism or localism, 
all private personal impulses, in preaching ; I present the Christian 
Year and praise it; and if I cannot have that, then I want some 
similar thing ; some contrivance which represents, not the extem- 
poraneous wisdom of some single John Smith, however intelligent 
or inspired, but the aggregate wisdom of all the Smiths ever born, 
if we can get at it; a wisdom that is the aggregate of something ; 
of a synod or a general Conference or a Caucus of Presiding 
Elders—anything to get ahead of Smith. Not that I would be so 
uncongregational as to want a bondage provided for Smith, but I 
would like something set up for him to look at and turn over in his 
mind, and perchance freely choose ; something portentous enough 
to make it a conceivable thing that he should choose it and go by it, 
by and by and when he has looked long enough ; if not implicitly 
then approximately or by fits and starts; so that his listening con- 
gregation shall notice every now and then that he is in the throes of 
something foreign to himself—that is, something that he did not 
altogether originate himself. 

Again, if you as a preacher distribute your emphasis upon a 
large and various list of subjects, as you will if you follow the plan 
I have been speaking of, you will save yourself and your people 
from all unwholesome religious excitements. Yes, and from all 


revivals, some man speaks up and says. Yes sir, that is so; from 
20 


268 YALE LECTURES. 


revivals that depend on an exclusive, prolonged, persistent presen- 
tation of two or three doctrines. And in my judgment that is not 
one of the least of the uses of the Christian Year. It does not 
forestall all fluctuations of feeling. It does not prevent seasons of 
special feeling, real swells, in fact, as at Advent or Easter-tide 
or Passion Week or Lent. I do not understand that God wants 
the fixity of the solid plain in the ongo of the inward life of men, 
but rather the beautiful mobility of the sea. But the mobile sea 
needs steadying, somehow, does it not? Mere mobility, mobility 
unharnessed, mobility uncontrolled by any objectives whatever, that 
certainly is not best. Standing as I do among a kind of creatures, 
namely, human creatures, who are three times too dead in spiritual 
matters, I have never felt called upon to make all the ado I could 
against what has come to be known as revivalism ; but if anybody 
asks me my cool opinion on the subject—my opinion on the whole 
—if he will bear with me, I am willing to say that all the revivalism 
that is really wholesome in the long pull, and will add up large in 
the day of Judgment, can be secured and naturally is secured in 
that annual circuit of preaching which I am trying to glorify this 
day ; and that one of the reasons why I glorify that scheme is, that 
it is sure death to certain styles of revivalism—to those styles, I 
mean, which are begotten of whole winters of direct bombardment 
on the consciences of men, in the use of a certain few missiles 
of terror and the like. Perish the thought that these missiles are in 
any wise unscriptural, but perish the thought also that these volum- 
inous Scriptures of ours and the truths they contain, enjoy being 
retired for months at a time, while a limited selection therefrom is 
made and trundled to the front and opened in a special cannonade. 

Years ago, I was calling on the late Rev. Dr. Jonathan Brace 
and he, happening to be in a reminiscent mood, said to me: 
“Thirty-seven years ago this very week, Dr. Hawes took me in his 
carriage, drove me over from Hartford to Litchfield and preached 
my ordination and installation sermon. It was in the time of 
the theological controversy over Dr. Bushnell. On the way I said 
to Dr. Hawes: ‘Do you know, Doctor, what Dr. Bushnell says 
about your preaching?’ “Why no.” ‘He says that you have but 
three topics, Death, Judgment and Eternity.’ Hawes dropped his 
lines and said solemnly, ‘Could a man have three more important 
topics, Brother Brace?’ ”’ Those of you who knew those two emi- 
nent men, and how powerfully they were differentiated from each 


YALE LECTURES. 269 


other, will see the points of relish in that anecdote; but I intro- 
duce it here for the purpose of saying: Three topics are not 
enough. They may be enough for one day, but they are not enough 
for three hundred and sixty-five. They are enough to make an ex- 
citement with, as one hurricane is enough to tumble up all the 
waters of the globe ; but the waters of the globe do not need to be 
tumbled up in that way. There are a good many forces where- 
with to operate upon the waters; forces uneccentric and serene, 
forces that leave the oceans so that we can navigate them and not 
be drowned, all of us:—the sweet moral suasion of the moon, 
and the complex swing of the moving earth. There is no danger 
of stagnation if the whole roistering brood of hurricanes stay 
away forever. Let them stay away, I say. Just carefully follow the 
Lord and have your meditations rise and fall with the fluctuations 
of his life and teachings, and you will have all the vicissitudes that 
are good for you. When I come along into the Spring and keep 
step with the events of Passion Week, I find myself submerged in 
as much emotionalism as I can comfortably carry. The whole air 
about me seems to be in a swoon sometimes under the stress and 
suffusion of the great themes of the season. And I am left in that 
suffusion just so long as is healthful for me, and then Easter pulls 
me out of it into another suffusion; and yet the beauty of it is’ 
that that other is not another, as being contradictory to the first, 
but another as purple is something other than red, being red plus 
blue. The red is allsaved and the blue is super-added. Blessed is 
that scheme of holy culture in which each stage melts into the next, 
like a tributary into its river, swallowed up but not lost. 

Thus much on the tranquillity breathed into u. hy the Christian 
Year. Our whole emphasis is not heaped up on three heads; 
whether Death, Judgment and Eternity, or some other equally 
solemn three. All the mental over-heat ever heard of was caused 
by inordinate concentration dn one or a few thoughts; and the 
only remedy for over-heat is counter-irritants or heat started up at 
other points. Warm a man up on a whole cycle of themes and he 
will never run wild on one. Wheel him through the Christian 
Year and he will be sane and peaceful, though not torpid, the whole 
year through. And what better can you have than that: peaceful 
but not torpid ! 

The only other advantage of that scheme of pulpit topics of 
which I have been speaking, that I will ask you to consider to-day, 


270 YALE LECTURES. 


is that it will make your preaching concrete and factual, rather than 
abstract, philosophical and remote from the thinking of the average 
listener. I think pretty well of a doctrinal syllabus along which to 
conduct our people year by year, if we cannot have anything better ; 
as the preachers of the Reformed Dutch Church are ecclesiastically 
required to get through the Heidelberg Catechism once in so long. 
But there is something better. It is one of the perils of that plan, 
the plan doctrinal, that it tends to take the minister off into intel- 
lectualizing in philosophical theology ; dropping the personal ele- 
ment, the Lord Jesus, considerably, and losing thus an immense 
advantage. My Brethren, most of us who are brainy and investiga- 
tory, incline to cease from tangibilities and expatiate in the intan- 
gible. We like to manipulate propositions better than we like to 
manipulate things. We are afraid of color and the flash of imagery 
and the beguilements of physical analogy in our diction. If we 
could only get a terminology as colorless as that of the algebraist, 
and swing along in his absolute exactitudes, when we speak, we 
should be happy. But nobody else would be happy, save some 
tenth man out in the pew, the algebraist himself perhaps, sitting 
there to see how near we come to a scientific demonstration in 
what we say. Is there much passion or much that smacks of the 
ground in mathematic symbols? No, you will say, neither do those 
cold terms suggest any living person. They not merely suggest no 
person, but they do not seem to have been devised or invented by 
any person, human or other. All such flavors as that are purged 
out somehow. But preachers want to suggest a person, such should 
be their wish. They want a vocabulary that is full of the taste 
of the ground, of affairs, of things, of visibilities, of life. We had 
better have a fairly spectacular vocabulary, than to pale away into 
x, y, z, and trade in them. Neither do we want the square-cut 
exactitudes for which those terms stand. Our subjects all widen 
away into the indefinite and their border-lines are wavering lines— 
wavering and misty. We are to deal in concretes, to be sure, 
things that a man can get his grip upon; but large concretes, 
so large as to be nebulous on their remote circumference. 

Well, how likely is all this to be accomplished on the syllabus 
principle? An annual course of doctrinalizing? After I had grad- 
uated from college, and had gone so far into theology as to intend to 
study it in a few months and was therefore a rather advanced and 
capable person as compared to the average of any miscellaneous 


YALE LECTURES. 271 


congregation, and supposed that I knew a good sermon when I 
saw it, I chanced to hear a discourse on Election, by one of the 
ponderous and admirable Princeton Alexanders. It was in a 
Presbyterian Church in Newark, New Jersey, that I heard it, before 
the customary congregation of that Church, and on an unspecial 
Sunday. And it made a dint on me that is a dint on me yet. Not 
on account of the truth conveyed by it, but rather because of the 
supreme ability of Dr. Alexander, then manifested, to shy the audi- 
ence he was addressing and have the subject all to himself. He 
was clear, O! yes, he was clear. And he was acute. And there 
was not an ounce of padding in the whole long discourse. And 
there was not one person of all his hearers who could have begun to 
make such a solid, killing essay as that. But the language was 
sternly intellectual and scientific and purged of all warmth; an 
elaboration from out of the cloister and not from out of any place 
that the mass of his amazed hearers had ever been in. And 
the thought was closely consecutive. If you stopped to wink you 
lost something. Everybody seemed to know as much as that. So 
nobody did wink; though as I looked about on the faces to see 
how they were all getting on, I noticed that they seemed to be 
about where I was; in a dulled-down and humiliated way, as 
though they wanted to wink a good deal. 

Now no sermon like that was ever preached by a Christian 
Year man to an ordinary and unselected assembly. His manner of 
getting his topics has externalized him and dragged him away, dic- 
tion and all, from scholastic methods of dealing with his congrega- 
tion. He may be dull enough by force of having been born dull, 
and limited and sealed up, but so far as his training in topics is 
concerned, it has tended all to carry him near to the apprehension 
of the people. Iam not getting this point out as I meant to, but 
it has some value if only it could be got at. I have great respect 
for intellectually able preachers, powerful theologians, redoubtable 
essayists, stalwart Alexanders and all the rest. It would be a 
pitiable thing if the Christian Church did not produce such; they 
have their place and function. But preaching is not essaying nor 
theologizing nor philosophizing, but a dealing with men, women and 
children, in mass and unassorted, for their salvation, Wherefore, 
our instrument must be their vernacular for substance, the English 
language in its most living and picturesque forms; the English 
language perpetually freshened by the speaker, in that he uses it 


RED 4 YALE LECTURES. 


with a thorough-going sense himself of the precise, live contents of 
its swarming forms, a sense of their radical contents as reaching 
back to a physical base, a sense of their acquired contents, acquired 
by ages of use, and a sense of what I will call their homely contents, 
derived from human life in its homely average. 

And our materials of discourse must be not merely real 
entities ; simple, abstract, thoughts are that: but entities vigor- 
ously externalized and made to seem like facts: after the manner 
of the Bible, which continually clothes the unseen in the drapery of 
the visible. Hell, for example, is a well-known, deep valley and 
revolting catch-all, where the fire never goes out. And if Jesus had 
some spiritual truth to convey, he wrapped it up in a familiar inci- 
dent or bit of common experience ; or he pointed with his finger to 
something then and there present. No Alexandrine monograph on 
election from him ever. Many of his hearers thought he was 
ridiculously simple, I dare say, or at least did not fathom the 
profundity of his simpiicities—and many of us, when we were 
younger, have failed in the same way. But now it is coming to us 
that there is no teacher like him for massiveness and reach; and 
that no man, however philosophical, theological, solid and able, 
need feel himself circumscribed or let down from his intellectual 
and scholarly dignity, if he formulates the riches of his mind 
in terms that are concrete and unrarefied earth-growths and growths 
from daily life. 

Now, my dear young Brethren, I have made a long labor, and 
whether it is a mouse that you have from it all, judge ye. I am 
certain though that it is something more than a mouse, provided it 
serves to wake you to the serviceableness of some sort of plan in 
your preaching ; that, as distinguished from planless on-goings. I 
have no undue attachment to the scheme I have been eulogizing ; I 
hope I have not. I like it pretty well, but you can do a good deal 
with other schemes. My particular enthusiasm is, I say, that you 
get some objective order by which to mareh, and be not left a prey 
to your own spontaneity, or left to skew this way and that by the 
touch and touch of accident: like a boat adrift on a river, which 
bumps now one bank and then the other, and gets its devious 
course in that unbeautiful way. The people in that boat keep 
moving and see a good deal of landscape first and last; but it 
must be a deal confusing-to take their landscape thus, at all sorts of 
obliques ; sometimes head on to it and sometimes backing up. 


YALE LECTURES. 273 


When they come to make a map of it, by and by, it will puzzle 
them, I fancy. Of course, when you set yourself to study plans, 
you will see that there is a choice between them and some of them 
you will reject. And when you have selected the best one, as 
nearly as you can get at it, and are fuirly in the midst thereof, per- 
haps you will find it useful to season it with touches of admixture 
from other plans. When you are in the movement of the Christian 
Year, should you settle on that, you must not fail to let into yourself 
the Inner Light, the Holy Ghost: partly because, on almost any 
Sunday of the Christian Year, any one of several subjects may 
be germane to that day, and the blessed Spirit may assist you to 
just the one of the several; and secondly, if the particular subject 
for the day is given you by your chosen curriculum, the Holy 
Spirit is infinitely able to warm up your subject for you, as you 
revolve it in your mind ; making it most dear to you and most dear 
and irresistible among the people. 

The two heaviest objections to all this that I have been saying 
before you to-day, are that an elaborated order, covering the whole 
year, is fatal to that revivalism which many believe in and love ; and 
that an external order, let down heavy on the preacher, is likely to 
impair his elasticity and make his sermonizing drudge-work too 
much: a speaking on this or that because the time has come for 
the same and not because his mind has happened to kindle to it. 

As regards revivalism ; let us be left to just those natural and 
sweet and fruitful vicissitudes which come of a reverent and tender 
pause, now on the Advent and now on the next eventuality and the 
next and the next, in the great history of the Redeemer of the world. 
As regards the damage to one’s spontaneity by the superimposition 
of an order, I observe, first :— 

It is found in experience that no such damage is incurred. In 
that thoroughly detailed system for getting through the year which 
is presented to us in the liturgies, for example, of the liturgical 
denominations when any Christian season arrives—as Advent, say— 
there is provided, among other things, a pertinent selection of 
Scriptural Lessons to be read and thought about: and what sort of 
a mind must a preacher have if, with the solar thought of the Incar- 
nation before him and with the Advent Scriptures, than which 

‘nothing was ever more lyrical and contagious, pouring themselves 
into him, he cannot raise a free flow and settle to his theme with 
delight? A man who, thus stimulated, feels himself bondaged, is 


274 YALE LECTURES. 


not fit to be a preacher of the Gospel at all. You need not tie 
yourself to the particular round of Scripture Lessons provided 
in the liturgies, but you had better tie yourself to some provided 
round and not make your own selections always in the interest 
of spontaneity. An individual selection, extemporized from Sunday 
to Sunday, is always a partial one. Only a selection deliberately 
marked out by the Church, or by the general sense of some repre- 
sentative body, is likely to compass all Holy Writ evenly and so 
furnish an even culture to all concerned. As a matter of fact, 
I repeat, a curriculum does not destroy spontaneity. On the other 
hand, it immensely increases it. Each Sunday, in the annual speci- 
fied circle of Sundays, presents numerous points of stimulation to 
the mind and calls the mind out and makes it sing in its theme. I 
have heard very able ministers of my own denomination say that 
the most wearisome and distasteful of all their mental work was the 
work of choosing topics whereon to preach. They were at liberty, 
ordinarily, to preach on any one of ten thousand ; and that was the 
trouble. It would be a mercy to them, in the dubiousness of this 
unbounded range of theirs, to nail them right down, even to Paul’s 
cloak. That would be a challenge. And instead of consuming 
their vigor in a vagabond movement through all topics to get the 
right one, they would instantly set themselves to direct, resolute 
digging on the cloak; and something would have to come. Con- 
centration is wholesome. Each summer, when my vacation draws 
nigh, I am distracted, I notice, by the great numbers of summer 
resorts to which I may go; but on that particular summer when I 
am compelled to use my vacation for the production of one to 
a dozen lectures wherewith to torment you the following winter, I 
am much less distracted. I select, of necessity, some place in the 
country on the railway, not far from my study in Hartford, not far 
from that familiar desk and chair wherein my poor old mind feels 
most at home. 


Me this unchartered freedom tires 


said William Wordsworth. There is no liberty worth anything 
which is not a liberty under law. ‘Thy statutes have been my 
songs,” said the Psalmist. Which goes to show that objective law 
may be transformed into spontaneity. Statutes into songs! The 
prescriptions of the Christian Year into a furtherance to the preach- 
er’s mind. Statutes into songs. I do not know that the Psalmist 


YALE LECTURES. 275 


could have bettered that if he had spent years upon it. I do not 
believe he knew how good it was. In that sentence of his he inad- 
vertently plumped out the innermost feature of the Christian life ; 
namely, the law of God as a restraint or bondage, utterly dissolved 
away in the free flow of a delighted obedience. — 


ASSIMILATION OF SERMON 
MATERIAL. 


Gentlemen, most of you feel your own limitations, I dare say. 
If you do not, I feel them for you. So do your professors. But I 
am willing to believe that you feel them yourselves ; your limitations 
of character and your limitations of intellect. In other words the 
grace of God has not finished with you yet. Neither have your 
teachers and the various other forces of tuition. And in your present 
circumscribed and half-and-half stage of development, you have times 
of looking forward to the forth-coming days of your service as Chris- 
tian ministers, and saying, ‘“ who is sufficient for these things, who 
has character enough, who has brain enough, and who, in fact, has 
a sufficient body for a really victorious handling of all the great works 
and tasks that seem to belong to our calling.” 

On the great question of sufficient bodies I will not dwell. My 
private opinion is that bodies are useful and had better be kept up. 
Indeed in the last analysis, success in ministerial service is a question 
of bodies. With no body at all, that is, if a man is a ghost pure 
and simple, no church wants him. For various reasons they do not. 
But supposing he has a body; but a very attenuated, undigesting, 
shattered and inefficient body; a body that has no voice, no push, 
no courage, no ability to sleep nights and all that : why, that man’s 
church calls will be few and ought to be. So then, dear Brethren, 
I should lecture on your bodies, and warn you and exhort you and 
tell you my experience and point to illustrious examples. But I 
pass it all, as I shall also the exceeding great question of sufficient 
character for good service in the ministry. I think character is 
more possible to be had than intellect. There is less of it in the 
world, but that is not because it cannot be had. Every man can 


YALE LECTURES. 277 


be good ; ever so good ; good enough, as-you may say; so good in 
fact, that his parishioners will hardly care to have him improved ; 
but not every man can be very bright and very massive, weighty 
and awe-inspiring, in his mind. | 

And another thing, your goodness, when you get to be minis- 
ters, can be used every day among your people and not grow stale ; 
that is, if you are honest, truthful and pious to-day, and then to- 
morrow are honest, truthful and pious over again, and so on, putting 
forth the self-same qualities, honesty, truthfulness and piety the, 
whole year through, nobody wants you to change, because you have 
been at that so long and have grown so reiterate in it. No, you 
are just as relishable the thousandth time that you are honest, truth- 
ful and pious, or the ten-thousandth, as you were the first time. 
Whereas, on the contrary, if you promulge the same idea every day 
in the year, or the sarne set of ideas, you grow tame, and the parish 
gets tired, and you must say something different; and right there 
comes the pull on your mind, and you need a good deal of mind, 
the more the better ; an unlimited mind almost you begin to feel. 

So, although character is indispensable, yet, since by the good 
grace of God it is so feasible, and when you get it, is not staled by 
every day wear, so that it is not necessary to start out into something 
brand-new in order to keep your people interested, I will pass on 
to consider the much more distressing question of your intellect :— 
that instrument whereby you satisfy the terrific clamor of your con- 
gregation for ideas; new ideas; ideas that you never put forth 
before, exactly or ideas, at any rate, so costumed, decorated and 
disguised, that your hearer will have a feeling that he has fallen on 
something original ; the same old Gospel perhaps, but the old Gospel 
so freshly expressed as not to be a whit threadbare. 

I would not ridicule this craving for freshness, neither would I 
intimate that the craving cannot be gratified. I think it can. Any 
old truth, re-lived on the spot by the man who speaks it, seems 
original always and goes out with authority. Or put it in this way ; 
whoso utters that which is given him to utter by the Holy Ghost 
operating in him then and there as he speaks, makes an effect on 
his listening congregation precisely as real news would, notwith- 
standing the news he tells is simply the exceedingly old and very oft- 
told tidings of salvation by Jesus Christ. There is something very 
dear and encouraging to ministers in that curious fact. 

I will pass, I said, to the question of your intellect and how you 


278 , YALE LECTURES. 


shall handle it to make the most of it, in both size and productivity, 
so that your congregation shall never be worn out under your 
preaching. 

Two years ago, when I was speaking in this place, I said in a 
certain lecture: where do our thoughts come from? when a preacher 
originates his own thoughts, where do they come from; and when 
he gets them somewhere else, where may that elsewhere be?) And 
I went on to try to answer these questions, saying for substance, 
that our thoughts come from our interiors and from the manifold 
endless exteriors whereby we are surrounded ; not as though the 
thoughts of interior origin are not made up largely of external 
material, for they certainly are ; but in those thoughts that are dis- 
tinctively mind-born and interior mind-born and interior as con- 
trasted with thoughts sense-born and exterior, the exterior material 
has been so digested and assimilated and made the man’s own, that 
he is not in the least conscious of exteriors, but seems to himself to 
be originating absolutely. So then, although at first it seems super- 
ficial and inexact to speak of two sources of thought, namely: the 
mind itself and the world of outside material, nevertheless, so far as 
our own consciousness reports on the matter, that distinction is exact. 
We do consciously, that is, taking consciousness as our text, origi- 
nate many ideas, whereas many other ideas that we have and put 
forth we consciously do not originate, we being at the time aware 
that they come from beyond our own minds; they are external 
things ; we are in debt for them to books, men, nature and God. 
If I had not already spoken here at good length on ideas subject- 
ively originated—in the sense now explained—I should want to do 
it to-day. But I must not repeat, (you may repeat honesty, truth- 
fulness and piety, but not ideas,) and I have more than enough to 
do in discoursing on Materials external, and the way we must use 
them, love them and beware of them. 

Well then, I am going to speak from this time forth until the 
hour ends, on Mental Assimilation, bearing down all the while on 
externals, even as in that former lecture I bore down on internals. 

You have noticed, I take it, that some preachers are very sub- 
jective in their discourses, dealing a great deal with Mental processes, 
discussing what that Mental movement and state called faith, pre- 
cisely and consciously is and what repentance is and how it feels and 
how it gets started in a man, and wherein it is distinguishable from 
numerous other things that look and feel in us a good deal like it, 


YALE LECTURES. 279 


and what “ full assurance of faith’ is, and what remorse is and how 
conscience in us can be known from other attributes, and how con- 
science works under either one of a hundred different sets of circum- 
stances ; and in the complicated mental process of turning to God, 
what and how many separate elements can be traced by a long- 
headed, acuminated analysis of the matter. Subjective preaching, 
I say—mental philosophizing in the pulpit—sharp, detailed, hound- 
like, endless, able, amazing, philosophizing—you have seen some of 
it and heard of a great deal more, for it is a kind of utterance that 
was more prevalent in the old times than now but it still. lives ; in 
some strength, here and there, and although it is highly respectable 
in its intellectual aspects and although a certain strong cultus may 
be built on it, yet on the whole there is a better way for preachers 
than the subjective way. A better way. 

The subjective method breeds an ela mrectne and anx- 
ious piety. A man led by his minister to concentrate on his own 
interiors, must be anxious. What is there there that has any 
particular cheer in it! At first sight one’s own self is depressing 
enough to him, but when that first sight is carried on into a minute, 
indefinite, mental and spiritual self-analysis, the thing gets worse 
and worse and no good and sweet peace is possible under such 
a regimen as that. 

Moreover, a preacher very prone to subjectivity, and therefore 
not cordially prone to externals and intellectual incomes from that 
quarter, gradually formulates for himself a narrow individuality—of 
course he does—the only way to expand and multifold one’s self, is 
to get out of one’s self and take note of other individualities, and 
hear what they have to say ; giving our own say-so the advantage of 
rectification by theirs ; but this preacher of whom I am speaking, is 
averse to all that ; introspection is his forte and delight, and so far 
as expansion is possible by introspection, he expands, but by that 
alone, for these subjective persons are not unlikely to be earnest 
and persevering, and what individuality they have is as strenuous 
and resolute as you please. But I say again and must insist on it, 
they are narrow—they are strong theologians as likely as not—they 
know precisely what they believe and why they believe it, and why 
you and I ought to believe it, and why we are distinctly less than 
first-class persons, if we do not so believe ; and they are formidable 
champions to deal with in a theological wrestling match ; however 
they are narrow and a considerable part of their strength comes from 


280 YALE LECTURES. 


their narrowness, from the concentration of narrowness, from the 
ignorance of narrowness, just as when you look ata picture through 
two tubes, so that you can see nothing in the wide creation but the 
picture, it immensely brightens your sense of the picture. 

And being circumscribed themselves, their preaching tends to 
circumscribe those who listen to them ; and circumscribed individ- 
ualities thus get multiplied and theology becomes stationary in those 
congregations, as theology ought, no doubt, in its gist, substance and 
core, but as theology ought not as respects the way men grasp, 
handle, express and apply that substance and core. ‘Think of 
evolving your theology from your own consciousness and from the 
materials of your own experience, and making it thus of just your 
own size and no more; when thousands of first-class men in all 
ages have been laboring in that field and have reported their labors, 
and when theology, as it now stands, is the result of a long historic 
process organically unfolded under the ever-present and orderly- 
moving influence of the Holy Ghost, more or less! Think of the 
implied egotism and practical impudence of such a proceeding! It 
is only implied ordinarily, [am happy to say. The men are not 
conscious of what they are doing. But if they just would consent 
to make one trip beyond their private and interior selves, to see the 
size of the creation, and count up the host of other thinkers abroad 
upon the face of the Earth and back in Christian history, they 
would be conscious of their egotism, and of their disrespect to a 
great company of exceedingly bright and honest souls, 

There are other evils of this thmg which I have found it con- 
venient to call subjectivity, but I must hasten along with you. 

I have prepared the way now to deal directly with the external 
materials of thought—the thousand elements that our minds are 
privileged to take in, grind down, vitally transmute, assimilate and 
make sermons of. : 

First of all, how are we to get hold of all that external stock 
and stuff? Not by being intellectual hermits, building our cabins 
in the little sequestered nook of our own consciousness and having 
a quiet, happy, self-conceited time all to ourselves. That will not 
do, as we have just seen. No, we must go forth among men and 
multiply to the uttermost our points of contact with human life and 
thought. 

Specifically, we must take advantage of wide conversation on 
every subject of human interest, not omitting all possible converse - 


YALE LECTURES. 281 


with common people, for there is scarcely a man anywhere in these 
parts, however illiterate and unthoughtful, who is totally devoid of 
“‘views,”’ (as they are called) and stubborn views at that; views 
that he will fight and die for, if you would have him ; views that he 
has assimilated somehow and made to be the pith, push and throb 
of his personality ; and then underneath his views, lies that great 
human nature that all men have; a very respectable and even 
august and pathetic thing ; get yourself into conversable terms with 
that, O preacher ; listen to what he has to say ; try your theology on 
it, and see that nature squirm as likely as not and express itself and 
fly at you ; and thus illuminate both the excellencies and the defects 
of your theology, more than a course of lectures could, perchance. 
And while you converse with all sorts of persons, do it genially, 
receptively ; not as perpetually shocked by many things that you 
hear ; nonsensical things, infidel things, malignant things, shocking 
things—supposing they are shocking, you are around after ideas, not 
to be horrified and paralyzed ; this is God’s world after all and truth 
is God’s truth, and He has everything firmly in hand, and you are 
permitted to share His tranquillity in the midst of errors and terrors 
and about all that is believed, said and done, here and everywhere. 
Move about. Get around. Travel your parish.. Do not be one of 
those much-cursed and much-despised “literary fellows,’’ whereof 
we have heard in these times from the many lips of the Philistines ; 
recluse thinkers, unpractical men, do not be of that sort. Meet 
everybody whom you can; and when you meet him assimilate him 
and make sermons of him—as I heard Mr. Beecher say at a dinner 
of mutton, “the next time that sheep bleats, it will be in a pulpit.” 

Again, I insist that you attend the regular and irregular and 
never-ending meetings of the Clergy and of the Churches; the 
Associations, Conferences, Synods, Conventions, Congresses, Clubs 
and all the gregarious manifestations of religious, ecclesiastical and 
theological men and women. I say attend all, that is, attend habit- 
ually and numerously. Attend the stated and organic convocations 
of the Christian body to which you belong, always—make that your 
rule—and then, as to the assemblies of Sister bodies, attend often 
enough at least to show that you are a light-seeking and promis- 
cuous person. The American Tract Society has always circulated 
tracts against what it calls ‘‘ promiscuous dancing,” but never a tract 
against promiscuous Christian fellowship and comparison of views. 
Your brethren of other communions can teach you many things. 


282 YALE LECTURES. 


So can the elect and expert, assembled brethren of your own Com- 
munion; the ministers gathered in council to anatomize some 
young pulpit candidate ; the Church Congress, where the wolf is 
very particular not to lie down with the kid, but to stand up and 
debate with the same and keep on loving him all the while—the 
district meeting for spiritual commingling and for the discussion of 
practical methods—my experience of the modifying power of all 
these things on one’s thinking, to say nothing of their several other 
forms of power and of the love-feast aspect of them, leads me to 
speak very favorably of them to you who are on your way to the 
time when you will be preachers, and when, therefore, all grists 
that can be induced to come to your mill will be valuable to you. 
I even like to see Christian ministers dropping in to “ Ninteenth 
Century Clubs,” as Dr. McCosh and others did the other day in 
New York. There the steadfast old gentleman sat to hear what 
Infidelity had to say for itself, and decide within his own mind anew, 
whether or not to give Christianity up. Being a Scotchman and a 
doughty one, he did not give it up, and went away from the discus- 
sion still a Christian ; but not the same Christian that he was when 
he went in. . He had more light; more light on the impregnable 
solidity of the Christian system ; more notion how to put truth to 
the minds of men in these days; more sense of the way Calvinism 
is unrelishable to the natural man; more per-fervid determination 
to cry aloud and spare not on the eternal truths. 

Again, you will find much in books to put into your hopper as 
sermon-makers. ‘The first of books is the Bible. More grists are 
for you there than in any other one place—or any ten places. Ido 
not say that because it is the proper thing and necessary to make 
this lecture of mine acceptable at this particular point, but because 
I have myself discovered it tobe so. I shall be referring to the 
Bible again in a few moments and therefore shall not say about it 
now so much as I might. But note this one thing: that if you 
have a habit of going to this Book to see what it teaches, rather than 
to see how copiously it supports and can be made to support your 
own theological and other prepossessions, preconceptions, prejudg- 
ments, then continually you will find yourself inclined to read 
numerous human books that try to expound the Bible and that take 
up single Bible themes and expand them into whole volumes ;— 
and even those Books that do not seem to you scripturally founded, 
you will look into. In short, you will be a multifarious reader and 


YALE LECTURES. 283 


your sermon-stuff will come from God’s enemies, not as frequently 
as from God’s friends may be, but almost so. 

I do not suppose it is our bounden duty always, when we 
approach the Bible, to unload all our life-long precious preposses- 
sions and read as though no point of truth had ever been settled 
and as though it were impossible to conceive what the Book, which 
we are now reading, is likely to say to us on this or that or the other 
point. We go to the Bible for a good many purposes and at any 
given time we approach it in a state of feeling accordant with the 
specific purpose that we then happen to have in mind; but I claim 
that one state of mind in which we ought to approach the Bible, is 
absolute teachableness and hunger for light. Absolute teachableness 
implies that we have discharged from our mind all bias, all prejudg- 
ment, all previous knowledge, as the basis of opinion. You are not 
in a state of perfect docility if you are full of opinions already, no 
matter how rational and biblical those opinions may be. Well, per- 
fect docility in the presence of this teaching Bible makes you want 
to know exactly what the Bible teaches, if you go to it with a con- 
firmed conscious prepossession that it teaches this and that, you are 
not in a state of inquiry as to what it teaches ; butif you are docile, 
you are in such a state, and if so, then it is inevitable that you take 
counsel of your fellow men, the theologians and others, who have 
studied the Bible and have written out in books what they have 
found there. That is my idea. And I should advise a wide reading 
habit. Read the writers with whom you agree, if you want to, but 
just as much, perhaps, read those who you think have gone off from 
exact foundations, if only they are honest and really have ideas. 
They are as able as anybody to stock your mind and make you a 
productive sermonizer. ; 

The external materials of thought are inexhaustible and preach- 
ers are entitled to them all. History furnishes material ; philosophy 
furnishes some ; science some ; poetry some ; all the multiplying olo- 
gies some ; civil affairs contribute ; everything contributes ; even the 
humble minutiz of daily life are very filling to the right kind of a 
mind and may be worked over into sermon form—the thinker is a 
universal devourer, or may be, not for purposes of gluttony, but for 
purposes of self-nutrition, and ultimately for the nutrition of others. 

But let me come a little nearer now to this subject of nutrition 
—mental nutrition—the thing that the fecundity of preachers 


depends on so much. 
21 


284 YALE LECTURES. 


These externals whereon I have been remarking, these mate- 
rials for the omnivorous mind you may possess yourself of in two 
ways—two and no more, so far as I now see—you may have them 
memoritively, or you may have them assimilatively ; in addition to 
that, you may have them in both ways at once. Quite as often as 
any way, however, the strongly memoriter men are not very assimi- 
lative, and on the other hand you may see prodigious assimilators, 
men chock-full of the all-about plunderings they have made, who, 
nevertheless, cannot remember much of anything, especially in 
detail. If they had no way of accumulation but the memoriter way, 
their emptiness would be pitiful and practically embarrassing both 
to them and to us. 

But they have another way. A man has not lost his food 
because it has disappeared from his stomach; neither has he lost 
the mental food which he has gathered in, because it has disappeared 
from his memory. The food disappeared from the stomach because 
it would go more fully and really into the man’s possession, being 
vitally distributed to the different parts of his system, and in the 
distribution being made over from merely material and dead atoms, 
into vital atoms ; atoms not unworthy of a resurrection to eternal 
vitality, when the Lord shall come. The difference between memo- 
rized mental material and assimilated mental material, begins now 
to come out. 

The disadvantages of the memorized sort are more than you 
would think at first. | 

Memoriter possessions you may,lose. Most of them you must 
lose. And you may lose all of them some day. To recover them | 
again, possibly, in the resurrection state, but for the present we are 
incessantly dropping our memorized accumulations. The Rev. Sam 
Jones in one of his peculiar sermons recently, spoke of a feeble 
little Mississippi steamboat so weak in her steam appliances that 
whenever she whistled it stopped her engine; and similarly, the 
limited memory’ of man is not strong enough to take in a new 
thought without letting out some old one, once laboriously taken in. 
A most miserable and ridiculous faculty in that one aspect of it. 
How fast does a man get rich and powerful in his mind by that pro- 
cess of taking and dropping, like the mill-mind hopper? How 
much does he grow? How long would it take to make an able- 
bodied thinker of him, a man of real weight and respectability; a 
powerful preacher, for example, provided this curious faculty of his, 


YALE LECTURES. 285 


his memory, threw overboard every day exactly so much of her 
cargo as would balance what she that day took in. Providentially 
the memory does not do that exactly, but on the contrary, retains 
more or less of the old when new materials are shipped—after all 
though, this being unable to whistle without stopping your engine, 
this constant losing from recollection more or less, while you are at 
work to acquire, makes one ask as I did, how long it would take to 
make a person full-grown and sufficient, if his mental possessions 
were all of that fugitive memoriter sort. And how many men, and 
even ministers we have seen who are scarcely larger at fifty, in the 
great particulars of intellectual manhood, than they were when they 
left the theological seminary ; because. they have, for the most part, 
led a memoriter life. They have read enough and been told enough 
to amount to something, but as the hopper grows no richer for the 
grist that is in it, and therefore after ten thousand bushels have been 
thrown in has not advanced in the least beyond its original hopper 
state, and would not have advanced if the whole ten thousand bush- 
els had stayed in it forever; so the memorizing men, however 
repeatedly they have taken in the grists of the mind, and even if 
they are endowed with those phenomenal memories that hold on to’ 
grists like a resurrection memory, do not grow very perceptively 
greater, do not weigh in a conflict, do not preach ponderously, do 
not get home on anybody with any special efficacy—with any efficacy, 
I mean, corresponding to their years and their privileges and their 
unlimited consumption of excellent outward material. Sir William 
Hamilton in his lectures on Metaphysics, while discussing the mem- 
ory and telling what it has been able sometimes to do, mentions 
a young Italian who could have thirty-six thousand words read to 
him hap-hazard out of a dictionary, just once, and then could start 
off and repeat the thirty-six thousand in the precise order in which 
he heard them, and could turn the list end for end and repeat it 
backward ; and could recite the list skipping every other word and 
could do all these things after a year or two had passed away; and 
I do not now remember what else he could do—and do not want to 
remember—the thing is frightful enough already. But did you ever 
hear of that man among the really great men of history? Did those 
thirty-six thousand words prove to be of the nature of an increase to 
that miserable young fellow in any respect? Sir Isaac Newton and 
Lord Bacon, Shakespeare and Milton, Homer and Plato, Daniel 
Webster, William Gladstone and President Porter, could not all put 


286 YALE LECTURES. 


together recollect a thousand words; so the Italian was at least 
thirty-six times the man that they would be if all rolled into one 
corporeal unit, or would have been they twenty-five times over, 
provided that the gigantic accumulator in his constitution had been 
able to assimilate the materials of all sorts which it was able to take 
in. But, so far as heard from, it was more retentive than assimila- 
tive ; and the Italian stands forever a solemn sermon to the world 
on the comparative uselessness of unassimilated possessions. There 
he is, a plethoric nobody and a warning. 

That distinguished Englishman, William Carpenter, I recollect, 
in his work on Mental physiology, also gives some striking illustra- 
tions of the insufficiency of mere memorizing to increase a man’s 
size, weight or quality ; or more particularly, he enforces by numbers 
of anecdotes the idea that strictly memoriter acquisitions, or things 
gained by “cramming,” as a collegian would say, do not stay by one 
very long. In they come and out they go and the man is a simple 
sluiceway, except that of course some small amount of material 
sticks to the sides of the sluice and stays—to no good purpose 
however, as it is not taken into the man’s circulation, but only sticks. 

Now, Brethren, I have brought you to a day of judgment and 
I want you to decide whether you will be memorizers or assimi- 
lators. If you are good memorizers, your people, as you preach and 
talk to them, will get a good deal from you no doubt. Perhaps you 
can stand up before them and run off thirty-six thousand words as 
straight as a string. But I want to mention to you some of the 
drawbacks in that kind of preaching, I have more than hinted 
some of them already, but the subject is not used up. 

First, if you get your homiletical materials by cramming, using 
a great deal of memory and not much of anything else, your personal 
increase will be likely to be small—I have said that once and nowI 
Say it again, your personal increase will be small. Itis a pity to 
spend several days making a sermon, and then to take aim and fire 
it, while you remain as empty as a fired gun, when you might fire 
your whole charge and yet retain the whole charge for your private 
use ever after; retain it as completely as though you had not fired 
atall. If only your ammunition were assimilated ammunition, firing 
would not decrease it, any more than pumping exhausts a living 
spring. Pump away, the spring knows where to get more. Preach 
away too, you are just asrich. Is not that worth knowing, for a 
man who may want to preach forty years in the same pulpit. 


YALE LECTURES. 287 


Secondly, preaching in the use of memoriter materials does not 
bring much gusto to the preacher himself. What is the gusto of a 
sluiceway as compared, for instance, to the gusto of a growing plant? 
Or make this comparison. A plant stands in the ground and 
takes up the mold and rejects the dead grit, and takes the rain and 
the dew and the air and the sun, and secretly makes them all over 
into just what it wants—namely, into life and living forms, with a 
murmur of inward joy the while, that anybody can hear and share 
who has the ears for it ; and then right along side of the plant, stands 
a stake driven down for some purpose; and what does the stake 
do? Does it sing at its work? No, it is doing no work. It has 
nothing to sing about. It just stands there a mere stick ; good to 
hitch too perhaps—a sound and safe stick, and therefore respectable 
—but a stick. Live things are liable to eccentricities in their grow- 
ing and forth-pushing ; sticks are not ; but which of the two is the 
happier, in all likelihood, the live things or the sticks? So the 
preachers. He who speaks from out of the vital stores of his mind 
and nature, has his own private glow and gladness always; enough 
to pay him well for his work, salary or no salary. 

Thirdly, since memoriter material lumbering a minister’s mind 
and preached at stated times does not make much heat and vital 
joy in him, it does not over-much do it for his hearers. What is 
preached out of the memory, is apt to be received only into the 
memory. How can an unvital man vitalize other men? The idea 
is absurd. He may instruct them. He may drill them. He may 
exercise their patience. But as respects vitalization he is a failure. 
And after all, my brethren, vitalization is the greatest work of 
preachers. I had rather be alive with little information, than dead 
with tons of it. JI had rather hear a preacher of limited contents, 
so that his contents have been turned into life and personal force, 
than to hear a man whose contents run up to thirty-six thousand, 
but are in him simply as stored in a warehouse. It is sometimes 
debated whether preaching will not die out before long, because 
books and periodicals are so multiplied. When you can get as good 
a sermon as was ever written, in printed form, for five cents, why go 
to the church, spend a hundred dollars a year for a seat and consume 
an hour each Sunday, to hear the local minister, a limited man and 
not a natural orator, preach a much poorer sermon? How are you 
going to answer that? By saying that the risen Jesus formally 
appointed preaching. But he appointed it for some substantial 


288 YALE LECTURES. 


reason ; and what is that reason? There are numbers of answers 
to that ; but the one that I want to bring out at present, is this : that 
while the contents of a book, or that five cent sermon, coolly read 
in the quiet of one’s home, may be powerful and useful, the self-same 
contents, or even much lesser contents, may be still more stimula- 
tive and useful, if taken into a vital mind and there transmuted in 
the mysterious processes of life into personal substance and fervor, 
and then preached. I think we preachers will have to surrender to 
books and periodicals, if we intend to go by memory and mechan- 
ical public rehearsals of what we have read. Of course the Holy 
Spirit could use any sort of a preacher to secure effects ; but accord- 
ing to all observation thus far, he will not. The Holy Spirit is a 
reasonable Spirit. It respects certain well-known laws; and if it 
uses a certain man or preacher, it is able to explain why it uses him. 

Well, dear brethren and gentlemen, I must have some words 
with you now on a matter that, I presume, you have been wondering 
I did not come to before ; on the question, namely ; how this famous 
business of assimilation is to be accomplished. Is there any recipe 
for it that a reasonable man and even a young man can compre- 
hend and put to practicaluse. Are not assimilators born, not made ; 
or if they are not made, can a person make himself to be an assimi- 
lator, otherwise than by many years of effort, experimentation, fum- 
bling and mistakes? If it takes nearly the whole life-time of a 
minister to fashion himself into this so desirable thing, had he not 
better give up before he begins and lay out what strength is natural 
to him in some other direction. , 

I propose to answer that. It does not take long for our bodies 
to begin to assimilate. It is a success from the start. And things 
vegetable make a success of it. A live slip set into the ground is 
as cunning in the matter as is an old wise tree. Assimilation is 
deeply mysterious, but it is feasible ; and a man does not need to 
be old, nor to be a philosopher to do it. So much encouragement 
as that we have, on the very face of the subject. Mr. Drummond 
has written an ingenious book on ‘ Natural Laws in the Spiritual 
World,” and I fancy that if our bodies can assimilate and do it 
instinctively and commence so soon as they are born, then our minds 
—and all minds—can do it; and can begin pretty early, and that 
they will do a large part of their assimilation nSunchia yes if we give 
them a good chance. 

I do not claim that a man can sit himself down and say to his 


YALE LECTURES. 289 


mind—“ go to now, do you just assimilate”.—and then have that 
mind march right off and do his bidding. No, he must get at it in 
ways different from that. 

I will not spend any time on it, but Iam compelled to say that 
highly assimilative minds, as a general rule, are not found in unas- 
similative bodies. It is a mortifying fact, but a literal, that your 
physical nutritive processes are the foundation of your mental nutri- 
tive. An imperfectly nourished brain does not receive impressions 
absorptively. A brain not supported by a rousing stomach, doth. 
not drink up all kinds of mental aliment, like a sponge. Make a 
note of that and act accordingly. Even the memory fails if physi- 
cal nutrition fails. I have had some experience of that myself, at 
times. 

But let us lift out of physicals and note the following things. I 
hardly know where to strike in, but perhaps a thing as fundamental 
as any to be said, is, that time is an indispensable element in assim- 
ilation. Time! The one vice of “cramming,”—the reason that 
cramming never made a scholar—is that the deposits made in the 
mind are made to be used right off, used and discharged. A vice 
of some preachers is, that they cram for the Sunday immediately 
before them, amassing great store of material, but not giving their 
minds the time necessary to grind, vitalize and appropriate it. The 
question of time in physical assimilation was looked into long ago. 
A good many years back, a certain Alexis St. Martin, (if that was 
his name,) had the covering of his stomach shot away and there was 
a life-long healed opening there, so that the doctors for the first time 
in the history of the world could leisurely enter a live man with their 
interesting experiments. And they wentin. They dropped in all 
kinds of food at the end of strings and then through the opening 
they watched how matters went on ; how long it took to get diges- 
tion along to this, that and the other stage ; how much longer it 
took some foods to get on than it did others and how some sub- 
stances never got on. It was a wonderfully edifying opportunity. 
But whatever they dropped in, took time, they found, and could not 
be much hurried. They could cram the man and then beg him to 
get the cram worked over by the next Sunday, but the man could 
not. Nature was too strong for him. Nature knew that she was 
entitled to just so much time, carefully measured out, and she took 
it, Sunday or no Sunday, and would make no haste. 

Well, minds know the same thing. If you read largely for an 


290 : YALE LECTURES. 


immediate purpose—your next sermon for example—your intellect, 
(or to speak more profoundly, your nature,) has no opportunity to 
do that brooding which it dearly enjoys, that it surely will do when 
permitted ; and that it must do if it is going to make itself fat out 
of that reading. And just here I mention it as a curious fact, that 
this brooding business done by your mind, when it gets a chance, 
is not a volitional effort, as a rule; you do not do the brooding, 
your mind does it; you go off about your business, perhaps, you 
give scarcely a thought to that inwardly deposited material, you are 
too much occupied ; but all the while your mind is manipulating 
that mass, that intellectual stock, brooding it, fructifying it, coaxing 
it to be vital, sucking it up into its own circulation by a thousand 
capillaries, raising it from the memorized matter to matter assimi- 
lated and organized ; a very amazing operation ; amazing and inscru- 
table. I like to dwell on it ; itis so subtle, so effectual and so useful. 
I recollect telling you here once, in some connection which I have 
now forgotten, that many times when I have been shut up to just 
Saturday morning for the writing of my Sunday’s sermon I have 
made special effort to select my topic for that sermon, Friday eve- 
ning—sometimes on my bed in the few moments before I went to 
sleep—because I knew by long experience that if the topic was 
only lodged in me, my mind during all my hours of unconscious- 
ness, would be turning it over and in the morning when I woke I 
should certainly find my sermon well on its way. How often that 
has happened to me. 

But, to come back to my thought. Assimilation requires time. — 
Therefore, you must read a great deal and take in materials also 
from other sources than books, (and the sources are numerous) ; 
you must gather in much, not in view of a near day when you will 
use those accumulations, but in view of the welfare of your mind 
for all time; and you should even ingather often for no purpose 
whatever, but only for enjoyment at the moment. You may read 
much poetry in that way ; and there are kinds of poetry that do not 
give you anything, unless they are read in that way. Those kinds 
were produced in the meditative and leisurely mental moods of the 
author ; and they speak only to corresponding moods in the reader. 

Or take that bewitching American man, John Burroughs ; when 
he goes abroad upon the face of Nature, his travel does not sim- 
mer down to the strenuous and fierce questions, which is the 
shortest road between two given points; and which is the swiftest 


YALE LECTURES. 291 


conveyance from place to place, or how soon can I pick up the stuff 
for an essay. Notso. He idles along, with hardly any conscious 
intention ; knowing that any spot in the whole open world where 
he may happen to find himself at any given moment, is inexhaus- 
tively rich in almost every element that can nourish and fascinate 
the mind of man. Therefore his contact with Nature is eminently 
rewarding. She saturates him. He gives her time to saturate him. 
He sits down in her bounties and beauties chin-deep and soaks. 
He lets time-measures go. He knows nothing but Now. _ Practi- 
cally he is in Eternity. At any rate, he has passed beyond dates 
and periods, and engagements and beginnings and endings and 
responsibilities and the importance of making haste to get his mind 
where it can repeat thirty-six thousand words ; and there is nothing 
left of the universe but first, Burroughs ; second, Now and third, the 
flower at his feet, the insect humming in his ear, the soft wind on 
his cheek, the grass, the talk of some near bird; the dear natural 
things. 

Now it is wholesome to read such books as his. They are the 
outcome of a peculiarly assimilative mind. Theyare leisurely and 
they require leisureliness. No matter about next Sunday. No 
matter whether his book will work into sermons or not. It infallibly 
will, but if you read it as intending that it shall, you have fallen 
totally out of relations to that book and Burroughs can do little for 
you. What you want is to cease from intentions, especially from 
immediate intentions, and thus secure leisureliness and absorption. 

It is implied in this absorptive or assimilative reading, that your 
mind at the time is in a state of more or less energy. Absolute 
torpidity and snoring over a book ; suspends all capillary action of 
the mind, or at least retards it, and it is as though you were not 
reading. However, it is not necessary in the particular kind of 
reading that I am now trying to describe, that you be in any formal 
effort over it. No; please loaf through the book. The mind that 
wrote it loafed; now do you loaf. Only please keep awake while 
you loaf. 

But there is a little different kind of reading, of which I wish to 
speak. It is assimilative reading, too; and assimilative partly 
because it lets in the element of time. In the reading last men- 
tioned, you are receptive, in the main, but in this kind you are more 
affirmative. You actively inquire. You take time to doit. You 
say, is this author’s position sound? Is he exactly fair towards 


292 YALE LECTURES. 


opponents? Is he exact in-his facts? How do his notions har- 
monize with the great immutable points of religion? There are fifty 
questions you can ask—and if you ask them it will slow your move- 
ment and make you ruminative; and possibly some single state- 
ment of your author will lead you into a whole day’s rumination. 
You are not consciously amassing stock for sermons. You are not 
cramming to meet some engagement. You are simply not letting 
that man sluiceway through you his ideas and propositions, and 
leave nothing behind for your enrichment. However, you are not 
specifically resolved to assimilate. The word assimilation does not 
enter your head. All the assimilation you accomplish is incidental 
and unwitting. All that you know yourself to -be doing is, drifting 
along those pages considerately ; sifting, questioning, judging. But 
sifting, questioning and judging, carry assimilation in them. They 
give the lengthened and drawn out time requisite for assimilation. 
The mind can not assimilate by a simple touch-and-go contact with 
anything. Newspaper reading is the greatest touch-and-go move- 
ment in these days. And it breeds a touch-and-go habit, which is 
apt to be carried into all other reading. It may almost be doubted 
whether the exceedingly increased reading-habit of the public, in 
these latter times, has made the intellectual fatness and personal 
weight of each reader more than the fatness and weight of his less 
bookish grandfather. It seems like another aggravated case of 
sluiceway. I often think of it when I read the statistics of books 
drawn from circulating libraries and find that seventy-five per cent 
and over of the drawings are novels; and also, when I recollect 
various young persons of my acquaintance who, each Saturday, take ~ 
from the public library, one, two and three books, to read over Sun- 
day. Ifaperson does that last, you may know two things ; first that 
his books are slosh; and secondly, that if they are accidentally not 
slosh on any given Sunday, he will make slosh of them, so far as his 
own mental increase is concerned, by the unruminative way in 
which he reads them, coursing through on a run, so as to be sure to 
be ready for two or three more books by the next Sunday surely. 

I say then, in order to assimilation by reading in order that 
you may be more plump, full of color and puissant when you end a 
book than when you began it, you must either read it in the 
leisureliness and tranquillity of simple enjoyment—as I explained a 
little back—or in the determined, robust use of your several faculties — 
of analysis, comparison, reflection and judgment; all this being 


YALE LECTURES. 293 


carefully unpractical to this extent and in this sense; that you are 
not consciously getting ready for anything—as next Sunday’s sermon, 
for example—but are doing the work for its own dear sake. The 
moment you let next Sunday into the business, that particular, low- 
class performance known as “cramming” is apt to begin; that 
operation which is infested by these two vices ; that it is too pre- 
dominantly memoriter, and that the necessary time-element is 
eliminated. 

- You will understand, brethren, that I dwell on books simply as 
one of the external sources of intellectual supply. There are num- 
bers of others, but the principles that should govern us in availing 
ourselves of them, are the same as those just mentioned, with regard 
to remunerative contact with books. We must give our minds time. 
We must discharge ourselves from immediate intentions a good 
deal. We must resolutely inquire, sift, judge and slowly chew our 
cuds. To be sure, our people are waiting for our last cud, so that 
we are tempted to feel that we cannot chew it, but must lump it 
right out on to them and then run for another ; still a preacher’s 
salvation as a man good for fifty years in the same pulpit, depends 
on his putting himself under a rather iron rule, that his very last 
cuds positively shall not be used, but only those that having been a 
good while in his system, are no longer cuds at all, but fat, muscle, 
bone, marrow, pluck and fire. That is what cuds are for. A sermon 
of cuds is profoundly inadmissable. A sermon of materials that used 
to be cuds, is all right. More than once in the course of my life, I 
have had young ministers, yet in the first years of their service, ask 
me whether they should sermonize from the level of their general 
information and power, or should get largely above themselves each 
Sunday, by force of a specific exaggerated preparation for that Sun- 
day ; and always, by God’s help, I have had strength to say, just 
what I have said to you, to wit:—no cramming—as a rule, no 
cramming—you can prepare enough without slipping into that vice 
which we so call. 

There are several qualifying remarks which I would like to 
introduce here, but I must take a final movement now to observe 
that some materials are more assimilable than others. The plant 
rejects grit and takes up mold. Animal digestion also is very par- 
ticular about what it undertakes to dissolve and put to vital use. 
And the mind is full of a similar fastidiousness, or spirit of discrimi- 
nation. ‘The thirty-six thousand words of that young man, or a table 


294 YALE LECTURES. 


of logarithms, or the thin and pompous little homily of the Rev. Mr. 
Chadband, when he gets on to his saintly and feeble legs, are not so 
nourishing as a great poem, or a passage out of human life, or a judi- 
cious selection from Holy Writ. And when I commenced this lec- 
ture I meant to point out what it is precisely that makes one food 
assimilable by the mind and another not—but no matter; we all 
know an assimilable food when we begin to chew on it—if it is 
gravel we find it out and if it is real meat we find that out. I would 
not slander even gravel. It may be good for exercise and for 
mental discipline in mathematics. Moreover, men of phenomenal 
digestion can eat it. Hens eat gravel; and must have it I am told, 
if they are to keep up their usefulness. Speaking of those thirty-six 
thousand words, I suppose Professor Whitney would not ask anything 
better that to be turned loose among them to spend his eternity. 
But most of us are like the Italian, to whom they were gravel. Of 
course, to some minds, pretty much everything is gravel; but the 
general run of us have our good foods, which we know as the ox 
knows his master’s crib. Good foods—good foods! Very good ! 

But perhaps the word most worth saying here and at last, is, 
that the best food in the world for assimilative purposes is the Bible, 
Put that in your pocket to make an essay on—the Bible as a food 
—not-a guide, not a treasury of important information, not an arsenal 
for fighting men to draw on; but a food to make men thick-set, 
strong, healthy, sizable and handsome. Some eminent ministers 
have been described as, “ Men of one book.” Well, supposing their 
one book had been the New York Sunday Tribune, or Tupper’s 
poems, (good as they be), or Edwards on the Will, (powerful as it _ 
is), or the Algebra of Professor Loomis; or any one of the now 
numerous solid books put forth by the fertile Faculty of this great 
University. Would those eminent ministers who spent their lives 
in the Bible and felt their enthusiasm grow to the very last and 
came to be admired for their stature, sap, leafage and heaven-like 
bountifulness, have achieved all that on any conceivable book save 
The Book—do you think—even although multitudes of men’s books 
are books Bible-born? Now why is this? In that essay that you 
write, just dig that out. 

It is thought by some that if they can explode Christianity, 
they will have exploded the Book that enshrines it and reduced it 
to the level of other interesting old volumes. On that I should say, 
they surely will have exploded the main strength of the Book ; but 


YALE LECTURES. 295 


I fancy it would survive and forever transcend all other productions 
on account of the immense human elements that are packed into 
it, to say naught of anything else. The elements of human life as 
it is—the universal human elements—the elements fitted to carry it 
home to the business and bosoms of the eatire human family, not- 
withstanding that family are dispersed abroad in dissimilar tribes, 
nations, races and individuals. I wrote a sermon the other day on 
Rebecca and Isaac, confining myself to the simple old story of how 
Isaac got Rebecca—and I could hardly live through it, the whole 
thing was so fresh, dewy, self-evident and sufficing ; so heart-to-heart 
with all hearts that know what a heart is. And all through the Bible 
you find quantities and quantities of the same sort of thing—that 
something or other which makes the Book the spokesman of the 
human family ; the interpreter of the soul of man, man’s congenial 
other self, the Book that finds him, warms him, strengthens him, 
goes into his circulation and makes his blood red, virile and copious. 
I feel often that I would go on taking texts from the Bible, carrying 
the Bible around in my pocket, putting it in my trunk when I travel, 
handing it to the bride for a present, reciting it to the sick, reading 
it at the burial and getting its sentences immortal sculptured over 
the dead, even if Infidelity succeeded in large measure in reducing 
its supernatural contents. Anyway and always, it is the best thing 
we have ; the best Book to feed on—the only Book that a man can 
exclusively live on and yet be broad, deep, high, manifold and very 
great. 


VERACITY IN MINISTERS. 


The subject that I desire to unfold before you to-day is the 
rather important one of Veracity in Ministers. 

I wondered at first whether I would not say inveracity, but 
after a minute, I saw—or thought I saw—that you might see or 
might think you saw a sly flicker of suggestion in that to the effect 
that ministers are inveracious sometimes; and I did not wish to 
begin with even hinting such a thing. Doubtless they are so, some 
of them ; doubtless all of them have their temptations to be inve- 
racious ; and doubtless the best man may lose his footing for an 
instant, and speak or act in a manner that does not bear looking at 
afterwards: we are all human, I suppose; but the clerical class, 
taken as a body, are among the most honest of men, they being 
almost simple sometimes, so that lay-folk take advantage of them. 
Not only do they keep out of jail pretty unanimously, not only do 
they get themselves up to the conventional standard of veracity, the 
standard that will answer for lawyers and merchants and society 
people, but they valiantly wax honest a shade beyond that, and 
speak and act considerably as though they felt they might die be- 
fore night. That is the kind of persons, on the whole, that they are. 

They have some special advantages for being honest. 

The vocation which they have selected takes them necessarily 
out of the companionship of the dishonest classes and sets them in 
a good moral atmosphere, where they certainly ought to behave. 
To be sure they mingle with the dishonest, but it is as having a 
moral mission to them and not as comrades and affiliated souls. 
Pitch never sticks to any one who goes nigh it in that way. Again, 
ministers as having an assured social position, do not need to prac- 
tice the numerous small insincerities and time-servings which many 


YALE LECTURES. 297 


do practice in order to secure a desirable standing. That is a 
blessed let-off. 

Also, they are quite looked up to as authorities ; and where a 
man’s dictum has that advantage, he may put it out frankly and not 
turn and squirm, and dispense an hypocritical palaver in order to 
make himself acceptable. 

Also they are not men hired by the day, and liable, therefore, to 
be dismissed if they happen to speak forth some unpleasant truth. 

Also, by moving around among men and women a good deal, 
and lending a hand in innumerable social assemblies, they come to 
a social poise and tact which saves them from being surprised into 
swarms of little lies, that are popped out by way of recovery from 
emergencies. If a lady of great blandishments and great nerve 
forces them into a sudden corner, instead of lying to get out of it 
as millions of bashful and unpracticed souls would and could hardly 
help doing, they, these ministers, are apt to have the self-command 
to parry and eel their way out ; and if things grow really desperate, 
they have the vigor and the character to just settle into a silence 
which, while it is very good-natured and gentlemanly, is also very 
baffling to the enemy. ‘This is a small matter to discourse upon, 
but I have myself been saved from so many falsehoods in precisely 
that way, that I quite dote on it, and like to mention it as one 
of the felicities of the clerical situation. 

And there are others, I suppose. But ministers have their 
disadvantages, too. There are a good many reasons why they 
should not be perfectly truthful—a good many forms in which they 
can lie if they want to. And some of the forms are so subtle as to 
be hardly perceptible, while some are so plausible and wholesome- 
looking, that the most pious preacher might be taken in by them. 

In the first place a man’s energetic desire to do good and 
save souls may induce him to resort to the following devices : 

He may use exaggerated language. No matter about the lan- 
guage, he says, if I can only get God’s very truth into these sleepy 
souls. JI must exaggerate, otherwise I shall not get any hold at all. 

Or he may cater to his hearers’ prejudices by lines of argument, 
illustrations, quotations, and numerous contrivances of speech, that 
he does not himself quite believe in and enjoy ;—for if this hearer 
is stirred up and made to bristle, if he is not stroked the way of his 
fur, all communication with him is cut off. What is the use of 
preaching then? You can not save his soul! Did not Jesus him- 


298 | YALE LECTURES. 


self, and his Apostles, put in reasonings on their assemblies that 
were not absolute, but were the nonsense of the people themselves, 
taken for granted for the moment and fora purpose. It was an 
oratorical adjustment to the case in hand. If the Jews believed 
that insanity and so forth were the result of demonization, why 
might not the great Teacher speak of it in that way ;—not as 
affirming demoniacal possessions, but as manipulating a people who 
did affirm such things. You see how cleverly a preacher may salve 
his conscience with the doctrine that the end justifies the means ; 
especially when the means are nothing worse than an argument not 
so faultlessly excellent and irresistible as the hearer thinks it to be. 

Again, there is nothing more melting to a congregation, and 
more likely to get their souls clear open, to what their minister may 
say for their good, than to notice that he has a thorough-going 
interest in them—not in them as a multitude or mass, but in them 
as individuals ; so that he cannot refrain from shaking hands with 
them often, looking into their eyes, asking about each member 
of their families, weeping with them when they are in trouble, and 
putting forth all sorts of emotional concentration upon them one by 
one, week in and week out. This is natural and beautiful and there is 
nothing to be said against it. But do you not see what a temptation 
the minister is under to furnish precisely the thing his people want, and 
in quantities to suit the purchaser! Perhaps this man was not born 
very emotional. Perhaps he was born well enough, but has been 
cooled off since he was born by a long-continued devotion to 
study, to things intellectual rather than affectional, so that now he is 
more brainy than hearty. A good many things are supposable, but 
no matter about supposables ;—here is this daily call for pastoral 
effusiveness. And for effusiveness in the pulpit, too. He must 
preach tenderly, yearningly and all that. He must have a tone in 
his voice that can reach clear to the place of tears on occasion. I 
say must; not as meaning that he absolutely must, but that he had 
better. And there he is. He can heroically refuse to go any 
further than he can in this business, and thus save his own soul; or 
he can overdraw his reservoirs to save their souls. And all that I 
have to say about it is, that he is invited to be inveracious by an 
invitation about as seductive as a manever gets. If he succumbs, he 
becomes “professional’’ as it is called :—professional !—a terrible 
word that ought to make a minister squirm as if the shirt of Nessus — 
were on him. 


YALE LECTURES. 299 


Again, a preacher is continually invited to be more orthodox 
than he may happen at heart to be. All the world over, conformity 
is a fine advantage to any man. Where there is a state Church, as in 
England, and Russia and in Italy in the old times, conformity is the 
one balm of life. If you take into account both the other world and 
this, conformity to God is the best thing; but if you leave out the 
world to come, and consider the one matter of comfortable circum- 
stances in this present Kingdom on Earth, there is nothing equal to 
conformity to the reigning religion. Conform or die, was the racy 
alternative they used to put to people. Afterwards, that was miti- 
gated, and took this shape ; conform or die socially and politically, 
and in respect of facilities for getting your daily bread. At pres- 
ent the pressure of the most advanced parts of Christendom upon 
the more laggard parts and even upon such as China, Madagascar 
and the “ unspeakable Turk,” is so severe, that what is called “relig- 
ious liberty,” is enjoyed almost everywhere. Still, some remainders 
or semblances of rigor, left over from the grim long-ago, are to be 
discovered anywhere you please to look. This country is as toler- 
ant of dissent as any, I presume ; but even here I should rather be 
a Congregational minister than some others I might name. In 
Philadelphia there are well on towards a hundred Presbyterian 
Churches I am told—almost more than is really necessary, a Con- 
gregationalist might be mean enough to say—but what I will say is, 
that in that city it were perceptibly better to be a Presbyterian 
minister than a Unitarian. You would get more invitations out— 
more appointments on important public committees, (those small 
exaltations that keep a man advised of his own importance) ; more 
furtherance all around in any enterprise you might start. The kind 
of invitation out that Roger Williams had when he tried to stay in 
Massachusetts, that Unitarian man would miss in these improved 
and clement times ; but almost as totally might he miss the whole 
miscellany of agreeable invitations—just as one of those hundred 
Presbyterian ministers would miss a good deal probably, if he should 
undertake to set up in Salt Lake City. More than a generation 
ago, Dr. Horace Buslinell—if I may mention him once more, as 
having known him and his case so well—was a more than suspected 
man, as regards his conformity to Congregational or even evangeli- 
cal standards ; and that dispute cost Bushnell a world of trouble. 
It did not unhorse him, because he was an athletic rider and had a 


good horse under him, in his faithful North Church of Hartford— 
22 


300 YALE LECTURES. 


then, too, he had an unweariable pugnacity of his own that kept 
him from being too humble under attack, to say nothing of the good 
conscience and the love of truth that were in him, but the ado over 
him was a noisy and distressing one—bad enough at all events to 
show how important a reasonable amount of reputation for ortho- 
doxy is. If the pressure on a man towards orthodoxy took the 
form only of a single, belligerent, heavy attack, one square fight 
might and main and then over with, it were not so bad ; but fre- 
quently it is not an open war at all, but simply an impalpable some- 
thing or other in the air, a something that keeps on year after year, and 
in the which the poor man breathes. It does not exactly kill him— 
he almost wishes it would, but it does not ;—it merely takes the 
caloric out of him, slowly and effectually, and makes life something 
less than life ; just as when you go into those great art galleries in 
Rome, in the winter, where no fire has been since the morning of 
the creation ; at first you are entirely comfortable, but by and by 
you begin to notice that a process of devitalization has set in. It 
does not amount to anything on your entrance, and you have no 
idea of leaving the gallery on account of it. You are not really 
uncomfortable, you say, but you wish there was a fire. Ah! well, 
you are a slightly-scuttled ship, and you will disappear. So is it I 
fear as regards that imperceptible mist of distrust which envelopes 
a minister who is a little strange doctrinally. This air is good 
enough, he says at first, courageously—pretty fair—I can stand it if 
they can. But in the course of years he discovers that they can 
furnish more cold mist than he can breathe with any comfort. So 
you see the strain on him to conform may be just awful at last, and — 
as likely as not he starts out to overhaul his opinions, peradventure 
he can reformulate them in a manner to have them sound like the 
good old traditional truth divine. 

And while he is in this business of revision, he is curiously - 
helped to make it thorough by numbers of weighty arguments, 
among which this stands out as large as any ; that if the people to 
whom he preaches are the least bit shaken in their opinion touching 
his soundness, his ability to benefit them by anything he says, how- 
ever true, is impaired, if not ended. That Greek there in their 
pulpit they fear, even when he brings presents. Therefore he must 
just stop being a Greek, as fast as he can. 

Again, piety is of much value to a minister. A little piety 
even, goes a great way—and a great deal goes still further. There- 


YALE LECTURES. 301 


fore he must furnish it. And the temptation is to furnish more than 
he has, And that is inveracity in one of its inoffensive forms. I 
call it inoffensive with reference simply to the fact that the man’s 
motive for being more pious than he is, is the glory of God through 
the salvation of the souls committed to his care. He cannot bear 
to have his people no more pious than he may happen to be. 
What a low piece of business it were for a minister to make him- 
self the standard for his people. In his sermons he always says: 
“Be ye perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect.” There 
is no implication in such utterance that the man who speaks 
it forth is perfect. That were an absurd idea. No; he is simply 
holding up that measure of character which is authoritatively given 
him to hold up. Well, if he preaches beyond himself in that man- 
ner, why may he not act beyond himself, and take on just that holy 
tone that he knows to be so impressive upon the children of men. 

My Brethren, I am showing you, or giving you a picture of 
the Devil weaving his nets, because I remember what Solomon said 
—‘Surely, in vain the net is spread in the sight of any bird.” 
My dear young birds, there is one of Satan’s nets for you in plain 
sight. He will want to persuade you to be pious beyond the facts. 
He will never spur you to be pious in more than seeming, that were 
to build up the Kingdom that he hates—but he will edge you along 
to be hypocrites if he can, 

And here is another net. Often you as a minister may feel 
that certain views held from of old in the religious community, ought 
to be modified. They are too stringent. Those views have respect 
perhaps to the manner of keeping Sunday, or to the precise kind or 
amount of infallibility there is in the Bible, or to the question of 
the punishments of God; but you sincerely fear that if the com- 
munity begin to relax from the old-fashioned rigor, they will relax 
for good and all before long; and you cannot have that. So you 
wink at their present ignorance and let them stay ignorant. You do 
not dare do otherwise. You do not exactly advocate these ideas of 
theirs, but you somehow manage to let the people go on supposing 
that you think as they do on these matters. You say—‘“The truth. 
is not to be told at all times,” and other old saws of prudence and 
sanctified common-sense you hunt up, and calm your mind with 
them. 

Or it may be that the public mind is not so affirmative as it 
ought to be on some point. Men have come to have sleazy 


302 ; YALE LECTURES. 


notions about penalty and hell, about the propitiatory element in 
the work of Christ, about the moral and doctrinal authority of the 
Church, about the over-observance of holy days, about owning 
slaves, and speculating, and divorcing, and leaving their prayer- 
meeting to go to the ballot, and raffling to support the Gospel. It 
is interesting to look back and also look around and see how good 
people have grown bewildered occasionally and doubtful, on pretty 
plain things, and have given Satan the benefit of the doubt. Well, 
the minister thinks that men and women in these confusions, 
cannot be jerked out of them by a sudden application of stark 
force. No, you must toll them out. You must lay down a long 
line of corn—corn that they like—even as partridges in the woods 
are beguiled into snares ;—all they see is kernels of grain, strung 
out and they follow on. In other words, you must rather pare 
down, or razee the truth, and deal it out simply as they are able to 
bear it. There is quite a good deal of this done in Christian pulpits. 
And it is so easy to slip into it. 

I have now mentioned some of the advantages and some of 
the disadvantages of the minister in the matter of veracity. And I 
hope I have taken you along far enough to make the situation seem 
an anxious one. It is an anxious one. The ordinary and average 
honesty is not enough for a minister. Of course he is not going 
to tell lies, nor steal, nor forge, nor murder. Crimes like those 
end him—and he knows they do—and therefore he is not going to 
commit them, even if he wants to (which he ordinarily does not). 
But simple seemliness and straight walking is only the shell of 
honesty, and this man of God is not a man of God, unless he can 
show truth in his inward parts. So then let me undertake a little 
close remark. 

I define veracity to be a supreme intention to see and describe 
things as they are. A supreme intention to see and describe things 
as they are! Many see pretty well, who are slippery when they 
come to tell about it, whether by word or act. On the other hand, 
many tell well—that is, what they see they report straightforwardly— 
but then their seeing is poor. That though may be an intellectual 
fault. The poor seer may get to heaven; the poor teller never 
will. And it is these poor tellers that I am after mainly to-day. 
Stupid ministers are one thing ; dishonest are another. The stupid 
ones we can get along with (we have to, at any rate) but the 
dishonest are different. Permit me to give you a rapid list of 


YALE LECTURES. 303 


hindrances to exact seeing, and describing. In all seeing there 
are two factors :—the seer and the thing seen. But let us look at 
the seer and the hindrances to exactness that lie in him. 

First—He may be a constitutionally gushing seer. Did you 
never know such? They suffuse the whole creation with their own 
rosiness, and report the creation accordingly. 

On the other hand a man may be a cold seer, by nature, and 
the creation that he reports is by no means the same creation that 
the gusher has just reported. But the thing that interests me, as 
set to unfold my subject, is that neither of them reports the actual 
creation. There is a chronic inexactness in the statements of such 
people, which you must always figure on and remorselessly elimi- 
nate, before you can really know anything from what they say. 

Again, the present transient mood of a seer is likely to qualify 
his perception and make it inaccurate, and that inaccuracy must be 
discounted in the report he brings of the object he has observed. 
One morning in December, 1869, I mounted a hack with the driver 
thereof and drove from Naples to Pompeii—my first visit to that 
fascinating place—and my last. But the day was cold. It had 
snowed. ‘The streets of the disentombed city were white a little. 
The dust flew too, on the road out, March fashion. I was physic- 
ally miserable. Therefore Pompeii is substantially a blank in 
my memory. It is pitiable that a supreme thing can be made 
to be nothing by some grumpiness in this vile tabernacle that 
we have on us for a time; for an uncomfortable man is always 
a misreporter. But if only we are comfortable what may we not 
see? We can even see things that are not. What the Baths of 
Caracalla in Rome amount to in fact, I do not know; but one 
sunny and warm day in late March, I, with a friend, climbed to the 
top of that great structure, and there, reclined and buried in the 
green growths on the roof, I dreamed and absorbed and blossomed 
for hours, thinking such reminiscent thoughts and luxuriating in 
such imaginings as a man of some sensibility might, with the his- 
toric city not far away, and with his own mortal body in a state of 
perfect warmth and perfect repose and contentment—in a state of 
prolonged purring, to express it so. So now that building and that 
day are not blanks in my mind. I could make a sumptuous report 
of them. 

Not always though do our moods come from our bodies. A 
man’s view of a good cause may be qualified and made a practical 


304 YALE LECTURES. 


lie, by some irritation he has had sometime in connection with that 
cause, or with some one engaged in its advocacy. 

A man’s view of the fitness of a certain person for a certain 
office, may be quite wrong (though honestly wrong) because that 
candidate has happened to cross him in some respect. 

Our moods are numerous and spring from diverse sources, but 
a mood is as much a mischief-maker, in the matter of true seeing, 
as color-blindness is, or purblindness. 

Again, the philosophers tell us, when they discuss the relativity 
of knowledge, that all things show themselves to the human eye, 
not in their total reality, but in so much of their reality as the 
human eye is constitutionally able to get hold of. And when they 
say this, sometimes they say it with a general look on their faces 
and a suggestiveness in the tones of their voice, which is equivalent 
to an additional piece of information to the effect that what we see 
when we look at an object, is to the realities stowed away and hid- 
den in that object—hidden forever very likely, from us—as one 
leaf is to all the leaves of the leafy world. There we are again ! 
Accepting the doctrine of the relativity of knowledge, what a baby 
report any report we make is! ‘The fault is not in the object but 
in the observer. The object stands there in its absolute bareness, 
offering itself to be looked at through and through, but it sarcastic- 
ally suggests that it cannot furnish eyes and object both. 

But even where we are able to get into the interiors of the 
object considerably, and see it in several aspects rather than in one, 
we, for the time being, are not at the right point of observation for 
all that many-faced seeing as likely as not, and cannot be ; and on 
that account, any report we make must be inadequate, and in that 
sense inaccurate. This remark applies especially to our contem- 
plation of religious truth. In the New Testament there are many 
references to the resurrection of man, and the subsequent resurrec- 
tion state. St. Paul, in his Epistle to the Corinthians, makes quite 
an effort to flood that subject with light by his reasonings and 
analogies. Also by his touches of exultation as he moves along, he 
reveals the dimensions of the resurrection fact quite as much as he 
does by anything he directiy says about it. He, as an inspired 
man, sees something that we do not, and by the glow on his face 
and his joyful gesticulations, we are made to know how this thing 
is no small affair. So then, we have a doctrine to the resurrection. 
We talk about it, we preach it, we put it into our creeds. Buta 


YALE LECTURES. 305 


very powerful sort of relativity of human knowledge comes in here. 
It is not permanently in, but it is in for the present. So long as we 
stay on the earth, the earth is our view-point in respect of the resur- 
rection. But the view of the resurrection from here, compares 
with the view of it which we shall have after the resurrection is 
past, or after we have gone around to the other side, as our view of 
a cloud when under it compares with our view when some balloon 
has taken us up and around, on to the sky-side of that cloud. A 
man looking up at a cloud takes his oath that it is dark and dismal ; 
a man looking down on a cloud swears that it is one of the 
brightest and most beautiful things he ever saw. 

So much for the power of standpoint, as determinative of per- 
ception, and of the reports founded upon perception. 

And this thing that I have called standpoint so often as any 
way runs into and becomes identical with that thing that I have 
called mood ; a person’s mood at the moment of observation. 

I recollect that when our war of the rebellion was on, twenty or 
more years ago, the strong cursing in the book of the Psalms 
seemed to all loyal people to be dealt out about right,—none too 
hot. In peace, such talk sounds severe. Our first feeling is, that 
David and the others permitted their emotions to speak up more 
than was necessary. But when our Southern brethren began to 
shoot us, and we were as indignant as ever was David, we saw the 
Psalms more as they are. Our changed mood was an advantage to 
us as interpreters. 

So when the Spirit of God steals into the heart of one of our 
circle of unchristian children, and converts him, leaving the rest, 
the doctrine of election seems a more real thing than it did when 
we heard it abstractly discussed and proven by our minister. 
Speaking of election, we should say about it now what we should 
not have said, save for that thunder out of a clear sky, that con- 
version in our family. 

In like manner the right of a minister to take part in politics 
—a right which we never denied, I will suppose—seemed not at all 
what it used to, the moment he in the fervor of an election, when . 
we were more moved in our minds than we ever were before, actu- 
ally took part—an influential part—and worst of all, took part on 
the side opposite to us. In our abstract and judicial mood of 
mind, taking part was one thing, in our political mood of mind it 
suddenly became another. 


306 . YALE LECTURES. 


Now Brethren, I have made a display of these incertitudes in 
seeing things and reporting on them, in order that you may discover 
what a fiery trial of our honesty we are all in, in this present world. 
The unprincipled man lets these numberless forces shoulder him 
about as they please, and he sees things pretty much as he happens 
to, and when he comes to describe them he is equally loose. And 
the principled man, ofttimes, is not principled enough to resist this 
confused stress of forces; especially as half of them are particu- 
larly obscure. These thousand-and-one subjective moods that 
determine our perception of this and that, are very often uncon- 
scious moods, like a vessel headed straight towards port, with all 
sails set, and a comfortable assurance in her own mind that she 
is making the port; when, in fact, a secret ocean current is carrying 
her leagues and leagues away. 

Now, a minister, of all men, is under moral engagement and 
obligation to see well and tell a straight story. 

First, to see well—To see well! I rather think that, ordina- 
rily, when we speak of veracity, we do not get back so far as that. 
Veracity is reporting a thing as we see it, and that fulfills all right- 
eousness, most persons would say. But it does not. We are 
as much bound to see things as they are, as we are to report them 
as we see them. That is the starting point of veracity ; to see them 
as they are. Right there, at the root, that moral quality, honesty, 
begins to come in. I have expounded the difficulty there—the 
complicated and awful difficulty—but no matter, God entangles us 
in difficulties on purpose to find whether we have the integrity to 
get through them. The integrity; not the perspicacity except 
as integrity makes perspicacity. No doubt our difficulties develop 
our intellects, and that is one of God’s ends in letting difficulties 
try to snarl us. He wants us to be bright. But still more and 
mainly, he wants us to.be honest. So he tempts us. He shows up 
before us all sorts of objects, in bewildering phases. They are 
bewildering in themselves, those objects are ; and they are bewilder- 
ing because our moods and our constitutional idiosyncrasies do, 
unbeknown to ourselves, drift us this way and that, and make us 
like astronomers studying the sky through their telescope from the 
rolling deck of a ship. I think it was Samuel Johnson—the great 
Samuel—who said that if a child of his, looking through the window, 
remarked that there were four objects out there, when in fact there 
were but three, he would whip the child ; so important to any good 


YALE LECTURES. 307 


development did he judge accurate observation to be. To say four 
even, when there are three, is a demoralization as distinct as to 
forge a complete lie, and say there are none. But perhaps the 
observer was simply mistaken, you reply. He had no right to be 
mistaken. He was careless as to whether he was mistaken or no; 
and with only that carelessness to stand on, he proceeded to make 
an affirmation outright and definite. There is a play of moral 
quality through the whole business. 

Here is a minister. He is preaching a good many things. 
Most of them he has examined to the full extent of his faculty 
and his opportunity. But some of them he has not, (I will sup- 
pose) ; still, they are conventionally considered parts or items in a 
roundabout and full-toned orthodoxy. Therefore he preaches 
them. Like the child looking out of the window, he says four, at a 
venture. Four is what he is expected to say, and he says it. I 
will not condemn that minister as a lost soul because he has so 
done ; but he has tampered with himself in a manner all the more 
perilous, in that it requires a little push of analysis and acumen to 
get at and spot its essential turpitude. Or if that is too strong, 
then say (more mildly) that his underpinning of character would 
be less worm-eaten if he stopped doing such things. Perhaps that 
is no milder. Perhaps a worm in an underpinning is as dangerous 
as a worm in a living root. Most of the demoralizations of men, if 
searched out, would be found to have their beginning in some sub- 
conscious, imperceptible minute defect like that. 

I have’ now spent all the time I can conveniently spare on that 
primary and foundation matter, seeing well, seeing exactly, seeing a 
thing as it is ;—for I have yet to deal with veracity in the use of 
language. Veracity in the use of language! That to which the 
term veracity is generally supposed to apply, particularly and prin- 
cipally. A man who makes a good honest start at that radical 
point, seeing ; is just the man who wants the language he uses in 
giving an account of his seeing to correspond to the facts ; close- 
fit—not a grain overdone, not a grain underdone. There is no 
intellectual joy like the joy of that close-fit, but the moral joy of it 
to a moral man is still greater. That absolute rhetorical veracity — 
exhilarates like a play of electric currents through one’s bulk and 
being. Often, when after labor or by a stroke of spontaneity I 
have wedded word to fact, in a match of one to the other as com- 
plete, self-evident and triumphant as though one had been eternally 


308 YALE LECTURES. 


predestinated for the other, every faculty in me has shouted for the 
moment ;—it is so satisfactory to have exactly the right thing done, 
and to have the rightness stand out incontestible. I think that the 
way in which the human mind coins words for its thoughts and per- 
ceptions, in a steady, copious run of coinage, without the least 
premeditation or conscious anxiety (more often than any way, and 
always if inspired and vital) is one of the most marvellous of things ; 
and indeed no mean image, but a finite duplicate rather of the 
creative fertility of Almighty God. As his great energies teem and 
teem and never tire, so do we his creatures teem ; word after word, 
pat and full, exact and well-rounded, the words fitting the thoughts 
to the last touch of fitness and the thoughts filling the words to the 
last touch of fullness. 

Veracity in the use of language, shows itself in such particulars 
as the following : 

First,—In a burning desire to get at the exact meaning of a 
word before we consent to use it. It is easy enough to heedlessly 
pour out words, flood-like and incontinent ; but this is an irresponsible 
and immoral procedure. Words were not made to toss about care- 
lesswise any more than dynamite is. When an honest man speaks, 
he pledges his honor to the validity of the meanings which he puts 
into his expressions; and he feels that he does, as truly as he 
pledges himself when he signs a note. I want to tell you of a little 
fraud that I committed—only some two years ago too, when I was 
old enough to know better and should have supposed myself man 
enough not to have done such a deed. God found me out in it 
though, and I do not intend to do so any more. JI was delivering a 
course of Old Testament historical lectures Sunday evenings, and 
was on the career of David. And having come along so far as the 
death of Saul and Jonathan, I wanted to turn to a particular good » 
use among the people, David’s beautiful song of lamentations over 
those two, beginning :—“‘The beauty of Israel is slain upon thy 
high places’””—but my good use could be best secured by accepting 
the old-fashioned interpretation of that composition at a certain 
point, although I knew that said interpretation had been attacked 
by scholars and considerably demolished ; nevertheless I put on an 
honest face and turned in on my confiding hearers that old-fash- 
ioned view ; muddling my conscience with the convenient off-hand 
thought that the authorities were not agreed on the point in 
question. But providentially, off in one of the pews there sat a 


YALE LECTURES. 309 


hard-headed strong man from another parish, who of late had been 
minutely digging out that whole history, and he mentioned to one of 
my parishioners this performance of mine. That parishioner knew 
he was mistaken of course, and told him so. His trust in my ability 
and scholarship and other things, was sufficient to enable him to 
take a stout stand against him, and in favor of me. However, he 
wrote me a note about it, and then I wrote him a note, telling him 
that the man was right, that he had the weight of authority on his 
side. You see I had fallen, but I got up quick; so soon as I was 
caught, at any rate. Well, in relating this incident, I have opened 
quite a swarm of questions. For instance, the recent revisers of the 
Bible have witched with numbers of our old passages that we have had 
the joy of quoting all our lives. Some passages they have caused 
to disappear entirely. Others they have left in, but not till after 
such an overhauling of their primeval supposed sense, that one feels 
like a criminal if he stands to that primeval sense, uses it in preach- 
ing, and says nothing. Is it as honest as a minister of the gospel 
should be, to be reading from his pulpit an old version whose little 
infirmities here and there have been so exposed ? 

And this brings up the whole subject of Biblical quotation. 
How far may we use texts and passages rhetorically, rather than 
exactly. Does the Bible like to be dragged in to assist oratory 
in that way; even though it be sacred oratory? Is it “sacred” 
oratory, with these devices scattered along through it? And when 
you come to preach from a text, may that text be made to doa 
duty it never thought of till you got hold of it and had a present 
and particular good you wanted to accomplish by its teaching. Of 
course anybody can see that we must not stand up and squarely say 
“‘ Dearly Beloved, this text teaches so and so,” when it does not. 
We may say, “It suggests to me the following twelve heads,” and 
then we may go on to make our whole discourse on those twelve 
heads. There is no lying in that; but how must that text feel all 
this while? Doubtless it is flattered that an educated and cultivated 
and religious man is so crammed with suggestions by its humble 
self; at the same time must not that text be mournfully remarking | 
in its own mind now and then; “But I have a meaning of my own 
(so I always supposed), a God’s meaning; and on the whole I 
should be pleased if you would make a thirteenth head on that, 
and let me serve to that extent, as my original self; and not asa 
mere suggestor.” 


310 YALE LECTURES. 


These points of equity are confusing to an undisciplined con- 
science, but to a man who is honest in every atom of him, the 
appeal of that Bible text is full of pathos. 

Now you see in a moment that in order to the truthful use 
of language, we are carried directly to philological and exegetical 
study. All people would agree that preachers need to be up in 
those tudies as a matter of information ; but I say unto you to-day 
it is a matter of integrity also. What is slander? Well, one form 
of it is reporting that a man said something that he did not say. 
And why is not the Bible slandered when some inaccurate and 
unexegetical fumbler spends hours every week in public discours- 
ings on what the Bible says. Unquestionably the Bible does say 
many things that he declares it does. The general tone of its 
teachings on the principal topics of doctrine and life, he gets at. 
But the Bible is like a person. It has in it, so to speak, virgin-like 
and elusive qualities and shades of quality which must be perceived 
in order to a complete and completely relishable acquaintance with 
the Book. A merely English scholar may get a good deal from the 
Bible ; but a Greek and Hebrew scholar can get more. Words 
fairly quiver with delight when you hunt them out clear to their 
radicals. When I take my food in a rather wholesale and bolting 
fashion—so much food in so many minutes—I taste it, certainly, and 
wish I had more ; but my tongue does not at all reach those ultimate 
flavors of my bread and my meat, wherein and whereby, princi- 
pally, meat is meat and not bread, and bread is bread and not 
meat—those ultimate flavors that the bread and the meat do most 
pride themselves on. It is impossible to get the whole marrow of 
Greek or Hebrew or Latin thought in an English rendering of it. 
Hebrew thought in an English dress, is Anglicized-Hebrew thought 
always—more or less. .Thought, that essence of the mind, instinct- 
ively takes on a body of language that is surcharged with its own 
idiosyncrasies, and any other embodiment would be a misfit to a 
degree and so far not an embodiment. We should not say that 
any living thing was embodied, when some sort of externality was 
mechanically put upon it. No, embodiment proper is the unem- 
bodied vitally and therefore characteristically expressed. 

So then our very veracity forces us to philology, to exegesis, to 
profound interpretation. If we intentionally misrepresent meanings, 
we are liars, plainasday. But if we misrepresent meanings through 
carelessness, or through laziness, it shows that we have in us the 


YALE LECTURES. 311 


making of aliar. We are willing to make statement after statement 
that we have never taken the trouble to verify. We are leaving a 
large part of the significance of our Bible—many a savory term, 
phrase, turn and idiom, unused and undetected. It is not right, 
T say. 

- Secondly.—Veracity in the use of language shows itself in the 
avoidance of overstatement—not to say understatement. Over- 
statement comes: From a real desire to lie: From an innocent 
over-rosiness of mental constitution from the womb. From an 
innocent over-endowment of sensibility. From ignorance, often. 
From a religious desire to make a strong impression and do good. 
Finally, and omitting, doubtless, some causes ; from an over-done 
concentration on the particular object which we are trying for the 
moment to report. Please grant me a little pause on that last— 
thus : 

Each object of thought is variously related to other objects of 
thought, and that one object cannot be seen accurately and accu- 
rately reported except as its numerous relations are perceived and 
weighed, and duly let in with their influence. For example: 

Now it is a habit of multitudes of minds—preachers and all 
sorts—to contemplate things unrelationally. It is the curse of 
theology—one curse—that so many fail to contemplate its several 
momenta systematically. It is the curse of preaching—one curse— 
that the men, so many of them, sharpen their attention right down 
to the one .truth or topic they happen to be on for the moment. 
It is the justice of God that they have up I will say, and if you had 
never heard of God before you would conclude that justice is all 
there is of him. 

I know it is one of the inherent and necessary infirmities of 
any statement of a truth, that you isolate it more or less from other 
truths. Formulation is simply a setting of boundaries around 
the thing you formulate; and those boundaries would not be 
such if they did not fence off that thing to a degree from all those 
things to the which it is in fact related. If you say—‘God is 
Justice !’’—you have selected a single attribute of God from out of 
his many attributes, brought it into the foreground, magnified it, 
lifted it for the moment out of its real place in the organism of his 
attributes and committed an exaggeration, a temporary exaggeration. 
Formulation is exaggeration, always. If you preach on an attribute 
of God you cannot, at the same time, and in that single half-hour, 


312 YALE LECTURES. 


preach on his every other attribute, and thus avoid disproportion. 
No, you must bear down on the thing in hand, and accept what 
disproportion may occur. And then at some other time you must 
have God’s Love for your topic, and bear down on that. And so 
on. But in all this your specific bearing down, you may tone your 
statements and reduce exaggeration to a minimum by being your- 
self a relational thinker—a man accustomed to recollect that God is 
manifold, made up of several great powers in magnificent equilib- 
rium and co-ordination. ‘The equilibrium and co-ordination of the 
forces of the created universe is but his harmony of living, pro- 
jected and made visibie. A being like Him when he came to cre- 
ate, could not do otherwise than have his universe like unto himself. 
I repeat, the way to reduce exaggeration to a minimum is to make 
yourself a relational thinker. One of the chief objects of education 
is to get young men into this relational habit. A man is not educa- 
ted till he be brought to that. One of the tokens whereby you can 
tell a great man from a man little and scrappy, is that the latter 
takes truth in scraps, or single phases; and when he speaks gets 
right down on his scrap and cackles with all his might, while the 
great man handles truth integrally. He, as much as the lesser 
thinker, is compelled by the necessity of the case to expound truth 
one phase at a time and in that way exaggerate. Nevertheless you 
will hear in all he says on that phase a sound as from other phases. 
Particularly in the moderation of his statements will you hear that 
sound. His language is not pushed into the extreme possible 
intensity of language. While he shows that he has interest in his 
theme, he shows that he has heard of other themes. Focus the entire 
vital heat of your body on some single square inch of your body, 
and you have an interesting inflammation, an inflammation which 
attracts much more attention than forty whole bodies, with their heat 
uniformly distributed. And in like manner a preacher who accumu- 
lates his entire energy and fire on the one truth that he is discussing, 
and thinks of nothing else, may set the people agape more than the 
full-globed, all-comprehending man, whose heat on this and that 
does not proceed to the inflammatory point, because he has a fervid 
sense of numerous other truths and themes. 

You have a good illustration of this that I am now trying to set 
forth in the mental temperance of a statesman or public man, who 
is historically informed and cultured ; his temperance in the midst 
of the flow and passion of present events, as contrasted to the 


YALE LECTURES. 313 


vehemency, overaction and overstatement of the public man who, 
as knowing nothing of history, has nothing with which to compare 
the present. You will hear this last, saying :—“The treason of: 
Jefferson Davis was the greatest crime since the crucifixion of the 
Son of God’’—“ Ulysses S. Grant is the greatest general since Julius 
Ceesar’’—and like ear-catching utterances. ‘‘This presidential 
election is the most important one since the foundation of the gov- 
ernment ; if we lose it, the cause of free government is set back a 
hundred years ;” and so on. Nowif this man only knew anything 
that has occurred between the date of the crucifixion and the last 
election, he would be more entitled to make these stunning general- 
izations ; but he does not know. Perhaps some of these broad and 
impressive things that he says are true, but he does not know that 
they are. He is too ignorant historically for that. 

Neither does that denominationalist who magnifies a pulpit 
orator of his own persuasion as the chief pulpit power of the 
Nineteenth Century, know much probably of the pulpit giants 
outside of his own circle and his own land. 

The truth is, all persons and things and truths are truly rated 
only by those who are in possession of the large measures of history. 
Exaggeration is the child of ignorance. Exaggeration comes of an 
isolated and unrelational contemplation of the objects of thought. 

But Gentlemen, there is a form of recoil from exaggeration, on 
which I ask you, so long as you live, to lay your rather undivided 
contempt. The moderation, the non-gushing habit of a wide- 
minded thinker, scholar and man of information, is a truly respect- 
able and imposing thing, as I have already implied. His considerate 
diction and his tranquil argument go home with their whole force. 
You know the man, and deduct not one ounce from his statement. 
Even when his diction is really tame, as sometimes happens, by 
reason of his mortal fear of excess, you feel that an occasional ice- 
berg in the midst of the general inflammatory condition of human 
thought, is a force in favor of sanity and repose ; and you do not 
mind running your own craft with her coppers all hot in under the 
shadow and wholesome chill of that solid mountain of ice. Also 
when your cool man, by reason of his many-sided knowledge, is 
made to be inordinately prudential and wavering, so that he drops 
out of the practical. push of life, you recollect again his value in 
reducing the fierce temperature of the creation, and are thankful. 
Moreover if his prudentialism, and his unaffirmative or mildly affirm- 


314 YALE LECTURES. 


ative tone extends even to moral questions, so that his yea and nay 
are not wholly yea or nay, but a little of both; as was supposed to 
be the case with our great Daniel Webster, in some respects, thirty 
or more years ago; still, in the midst of the frantic positiveness of 
multitudes who are positive in inverse ratio to their information 
and their sense of the totality of things, it refreshes you to see an 
extreme man who is extreme in the direction of tranquillity and 
considerateness. 

But I cannot say so much in praise of that affected moderation 
which we sometimes see—that refusal to be absolutely concluded 
and enthusiastic in respect of anything, which some persons put on. 
They put it on and there is where the contemptibleness of the 
thing comes in. They have no all-sided information and all-sided 
habit of thought, which moderates them ; but they moderate them- 
selves intentionally and deliberately, because to be moderate is so like 
those unexcited and well-poised men and women who are informed 
and thoughtful. When I first visited the old world and saw certain 
first things over there, I was much moved ; but I had with me as a 
temporary companion, a young Englishman, to me a stranger, up 
from London on his country vacation, who sat in the same beautiful 
ruined Abbey that was near drowning me in a certain sort of 
emotion, and serenely nibbled his lunch. He was not hungry (we 
had just had our breakfast) but neither was he hungry for the 
Abbey ; and as between the two, it was much more genteel to eat 
and not let the Abbey run away with him, than to imitate me and 
let it out that he never before saw,an Abbey in the beauty of hun- 
dreds of years of decline, and so advertise his own greenness. The 
gentility of indifferentism !—that is what I want you to despise. 
If you are so completely informed about Abbeys that you cannot 
learn anything more in that line, and if you have been daily rubbing 
against Abbeys from-the moment you were born, and -on that 
account are more bewitched with your lunch than with the moss- 
mantled pile; why go on and eat ;—that is honest, and to that 
extent it is respectable. But if you are as unpracticed in Abbeys as 
is the over-flowing Yankee man at your side, and devote yourself to 
your lunch simply to lie, and notify him that you are not so much 
of a fool as he (which is just what millions do) then there is noth- 
ing respectable about it. To be green is no discredit necessarily 
(though it is a misfortune) but to be untruthful is a great discredit. 
Sometimes even young men and young women assume this gen- 


YALE LECTURES. 315 


teel indifference to all things, whereof I speak. When a mature 
person puts on indifference, we may be deceived by him at first. 
Possibly the man is as informed and experienced and as staled by 
experience as he appears to be; but as to these young people we 
know better right off. They have not been in the world so long, 
and traveled about so much and so deeply entered into all sorts of 
things, that a fine landscape cannot flush them, and a fine oration, 
or concert, or picture is a weariness to their souls ; and a fascinating 
human character has no fascination, they have encountered such a 
glut of them. No; they, keeping cool as they do, are little hum- 
bugs—and plain humbugs. 

Is it exaggeration to oversee and overstate :—to wreck one’s 
native tongue in trying to express one’s strong impressions ; as. some 
young gentlewomen are malignantly accused of doing—but is it not 
also exaggeration to purposely and guilefully cultivate languor, exnuz, 
and an air as though you had seen everything there is to see, and 
sampled it, and engulfed yourself in satiety by much sampling? 
Is it not exaggeration to profess and pretend to the moderation of 
the many-sided observer and thinker? Is it veracity in the use of 
language, to call a whirlwind “elegant” and an avalanche “a nice 
thing’? and a magnificent sunset ‘“‘a rather pretty scene” and a 
Gen Gordon shut up in Egypt, and oblivious of everything save 
God and duty, “too lovely for anything!” Are not these diminu- 
tives—these hypocritical diminutives, lies. If they had in them 
only the infirmity of inexactness they would be inveracious and a 
sort of slander—for no one is entitled to apply to things that are in 
reality so overwhelming, such incommensurate, petty and miserable 
adjectives. But when these adjectives are selected for a hypocritical 
purpose, they contain a second immorality. 

O! how good it is to get out of all this feebleness and imposi- 
tion, and out of real indifferentism with its tamed-down language 
and its unflushed face, into the outrightness, rest and self-commitment 
of Shakespeare, and Hebrew prophets, and imprecating Psalmists 
who knew the difference between Babylon and Jerusalem and did 
not doubt that God also knew the difference !—to get away from _ 
that everlasting balancing of probabilities in the moral field, which 
emasculates a man’s affirmatives and his negatives too—to be out of 
it into the clear sight and the perpendicular faith even of such 
whole-hearted haters, and un-Addisonian rhetoricians, as Thomas 
Carlyle, and Dr. South, and John Milton, in some of his prose 

a3 


316 YALE LECTURES. 


utterances ; and many another utterly resolved and vehement soul. 
Of course no extreme can be defended, but as between the lacka- 
daisical on the one side and the over-rugged on the other; as 
between Hercules and Nancy; as between strength, vision and 
fresh sensibility exaggerated, and the exaggeration of diminutives, 
indifferentism, pretense, and weakliness, can any reasonable mortal 
hesitate ? . 

Now in some pulpits it is Nancy that you hear, and not Hercu- 
les. It is not Miss Nancy, but alas! it is Mr. Nancy. First, he 
thinks it would be unphilosophical to warm up and say something. 
The true way is to put in the pros and cons, and when you get them 
all in to just stand in them chin-deep, and look helpless. This 
preacher has reduced dubiousness to a fine art. Doubtless he has 
escaped out of exaggeration, but he has not landed anywhere. 
Neither has he landed his people anywhere. In the next place he 
abates his diction to correspond to the neutralism of his thought. 
It is proper and pale, and inoffensive and unpotential, and void of 
positive verity. An adjective with a real swelter in it would con- 
vulse him. Doubtless there are many sweltering realities in the 
Book and Providence of God, and in human life, which ought not 
to be formulated at all unless in terms correspondingly sultry ; but 
this man is in the moral bewilderment of the idea that a thing 
understated is not wronged and therefore, to be on the safe side he 
tones down his utterance beyond the facts. 

To be on the safe side! Well, Gentlemen, as my final contri- 
bution to your enlightenment to-day, I will draw out here a recipe 


for keeping on the safe side. Are you afraid you shall seem more: 


interested in the things you describe than the real worth of those 
things will justify? Are you afraid you shall seem more orthodox 
than you are, more pious than you are, more fascinated with each 
parishioner than any mortal of any discrimination can be with some 
of them, more emphatic all around than the facts will warrant? 
Well, listen. As regards the truths we are called to preach, 
and the human and divine interests we are set to conserve and ad- 
vance ; thank God over-emphasis is not possible. Not to emphasize 
them and make everything ring when we discuss them, is to imitate 
that man referred to who spoke of a hurricane as “a nice thing,” 
and of God’s vice-regent in the Egyptian desert with the hosts 
of Hell surging at his gates day and night, as “just lovely.” Let 
no preacher practically disparage the things whereof he speaks, by 


a 


YALE LECTURES. 317 


speaking of them faintly and in a small way. They are not small, 
and he need not be when he handles them. 

There is no difficulty there. The lawyers and the doctors do 
not have just the advantage that we do at that point. The realities 
to which they give themselves are pretty great, and they may put in 
their energies accordingly ; but ours are much greater. We have 
undertaken to co-work with the Son of God in the spiritual salvation 
of the world, to fill up (O! searching thought!) “to fill up that 
which is lacking of the afflictions of Christ, for the sake of the 
Church which is his body ;” not by physical endurances necessarily 
or mainly, but by entering into the fellowship of his spiritual 
anxieties and sufferings, which spiritual sufferings of his are the 
pivotal point of his mediatorship, the point of ultimate pressure 
when he bore the sin of the whole world. If a lawyer gets a case 
involving a few millions, he considers that he has a great case, and 
he moves into it with all his powers, and his entire argument palpi- 
tates with the heart-beat of those millions, while neither judge nor 
jury look upon it as anything unseemly or disproportionate if his 
language seems to say continually :—“ This is a matter of millions.” 
Well, let us preachers talk as though we had millions in the case. 

But as to that recipe. Here it is. 

If a man is substantially orthodox, and substantially religious, 
and substantially resolved to save his every parishioner, then he 
himself is saved forever and utterly from all kinds of excessive 
action and speech. 

I read in an English newspaper of a gentleman in London, a 
Swiss gentleman of much character and ability, but of a curious 
negligence in keeping himself personally clean. He began to be ailing 
in a way that he did not understand and he sought the counsel of an 
eminent physician, who knew his peculiarities. And this physician 
wrote out an uncommonly particularized and professional prescrip- 
tion for him ;—which he carefully read and then said: ‘Why, 
Doctor, I do not see that this is anything more or less than taking 
a bath.” ‘Well, it is open to that objection,” replied the Doctor. 
“Tt is open to that objection.” 

And my recipe is similar to that. I introduced it with some 
pomposity, as though I were opening a brand new box of wisdom, 
but in reality it is as old-fashioned and tame as taking a bath. I 
simply say :—My Dear Young Brethren, do you just be good men, 
and then you may speak and act, orthodoxly, piously, and with 


318 - ; YALE LECTURES. 


pastoral affection. There will be no exaggeration and hypocrisy of 
exaggeration init. But out of you (as the Holy Scriptures intimate), 
shall flow veracities like rivers of living water. 

Now notice, I do not insist that you shall be good, by a good- 
ness such as only one minister in ten thousand reaches, before you 
shall let yourself be a preacher or a pastor at all. Of course that 
one man in ten thousand is the very man you must try to be—it 
were shameful to aim at anything less—but the presumption is that 
you will not be he. You will be more than you would be if you 
did not strive to be he, but the chances that you will reach to his 
stature are nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine to one. A 
discouraging way to state it, but we want to get at the facts. 

Well, as extreme saintliness is possible to you, but extremely 
improbable (according to those figures), I advise you to make sure 
of a decent average of goodness among that multitudinous nine 
thousand and over; and on that as a working basis rest your min- 
istry down, and go on. As your years multiply and your spiritual 
strivings multiply, and you approximate that eminent and solitary 
divine just mentioned, you can lift your ministry, your preaching 
and your pastoring to square with the new facts. If your preach- 
ing and pastor-work advances faster than you advance toward 
yonder eminent saint, that is inveracity—the thing I am lecturing 
against—but if you advance your talk, and your deeds, and your 
asking your people about their families, only and precisely as you 
yourself do interiorly get on, that is exactness before God and man 
and before your own conscience. Do that, and you can roll your- 
self as a sweet morsel under your own tongue, all the while. And 
you can do that. Theoretically, you can be the one minister in ten 
thousand, but with ten thousand figures, save one, against you, your 
theoretical possibility is mainly a beautiful object of contemplation. 
But to be a good man simply, is practicable. You can have a sharp 
and effective conscience. You can have religious feelings. You can 
have communion with God. You can have the graces of the Holy 
Spirit. I will not stop to name those graces, but you can have 
them. And you can have in you a daily steadfast push to do 
your duty. And if you get all those plain and feasible things, 
you are a man worth having in any parish—city or country. 

And then as to that ofttimes pretty difficult matter, the having 
an enormous interest in every pew-holder, both temporal and spirit- 
ual, I observe : 


YALE LECTURES. 319 


First—That there are undeniable differences in pew-holders, 
which differences not to see were unintellectual and inveracious. 
Some of these persons it were the work of a lifetime to warm up to, 
particularly if you keep in mind their characteristic imperfections. 
By dropping those and making believe that they have no imperfec- 
tions you may embrace them with a degree of heartiness :—but it 
is better to take men just as they are, and accurately size the 
dimensions of the problem and the job you have to handle. Let 
us know the worst. 

It would seem then—taking the matter as far as we have now 
got along in it—it would seem that a minister, an honest and dis- 
cerning minister, simply cannot treat his whole parish alike. He 
may treat them alike in all ways of practical kindness, but when 
you come to the endearments of personal intercourse, the melting 
right down on one’s neck, so to say; why he cannot. He must 
select. Even Jesus knew the difference between Herod and Pilate 
and Mary of Bethany—knew it and marked it. 

But let us rise a little now, and light up this terrible matter, 
by a second remark, which does light it up, and let the minister out 
into a plain and good path. 

Our specific and characteristic relation as ministers to our 
congregation is religious and not social. ‘To be sure sociality comes 
in, incidentally, and may be very sweet, just as when we go a-fish- 
ing, it is necessary, and may be refreshing, to get down to and 
perhaps into the same water with the fish. The fish are pleased 
and we are pleased very likely. But that is not what we are there 
for. No; we are there to catch them. If their being pleased to 
have us in the water with them, makes it easier for us to catch them 
(as it probably does), it is all right; but pleasure—either in them 
or in us—is not our end. 

Well, the moment a minister disengages his end or aim from 
sociality, and everything else, and bears right down to the personal 
salvation of these men and women, the solemn question whether he 
can bring himself to really enjoy falling on their necks, and on the 
neck of Herod just the same as on the neck of John or Mary— 
that question subsides. He does not care whether he can or not. 
He loves them all, as the purchase of the Lord Jesus; and the 
more it seems unlikely he can ever love this one and that one of 
them on natural principles, they are so faulty and disagreeable, the 
more intensely is he drawn to them in spiritual affection. Just 


320 YALE LECTURES. 


think of Mr. Moody standing before a great assembly of roughs in 
low London or low New York! A steaming witch’s cauldron 
were not more repulsive to every moral sense and every physical 
sense. But this very repulsiveness is what attracts Moody to them 
infinitely. Ido not doubt that the man, any time, ona square au- 
thentic challenge, would die for the most far-gone scoundrel among 
them ; and do it joyfully. Let a minister once get that affection 
into him, the religious affection, the true affection of his holy 
office, and it transfigures all his Herod pew-holders before his eyes. 
—yYes, the beauty of him who died for these Herods is imputed to 
them, and he sees them in the glory of that ideal character to which 
by the redeeming grace of God they may come. 





HIGH-HEARTEDNESS IN THE 
MINISTRY. 


My brethren, it is one of the best blessings to be permitted to 
be a Christian minister. Permitted by your personal make-up ; per- 
mitted by your circumstances ; permitted by the favorable voice of 
the Church ; and permitted by the sufficiently clear call of your God, 
delivered to you by the Holy Ghost operating in your consciousness. 
With what a solid and good feeling, now, I give to you that testi- 
mony, founded on what little I myself have experienced and upon 
a considerable observation of the ministerial class. In fact, I do 
not see how a man could consent to stand here and speak in these 
courses of lectures at all, if he did not have that feeling about our 
vocation. I think your honest faces down there, looking at him, 
would make him blush at his own hypocrisy should he try it. 

However, there is slag in almost everything. This is a world of 
slag. Slag came in, when Adam went out of paradise and it is 
here yet. And so there naturally come into our work some things, 
and some things are often allowed to come in when there is no need 
of it, which tend to kill enthusiasm in the minister ; so that you can 
actually see scattered instances of them, who started out with fresh- 
ness, determination and expectancy, but have gradually sunk into 
routine, dignity, decorum and unhopefulness. They are not de- 
moralized, in the sense of being immoral, these that I have in mind. 
They have not lapsed from the truth. Their trumpet, what trumpet. 
they have, gives no uncertain sound. They move through the 
circle of their duties with the punctuality of a chronometer. Their 
long professional service has stamped their personal appearance 
and demeanor, so that they are eminently respectable men to 
meet and look at. And they will keep on in their appointed round 


322 YALE LECTURES. 


till their years end, and will have some conventional scripture to 
speak for them, on their tombstone. But they are not enthusiastic. 
I do not mean gushing, but enthusiastic. Some of God’s ministers 
are as chirping at sixty or seventy years of age, as they were when 
they began. They have found nothing in the courses of their work 
to make them humdrum. But these others have. And now, what 
is it that they have found? Just what the chipper ones have found, 
in many respects. 

For instance, when they began to be preachers, they supposed 
that if they made good arguments, before a reasonable congregation, 
and quoted good scriptures and closed their discourse always with 
a suitable, well-meant, unimpeachable application of their subject, 
then all those reasonable human beings would be convinced and act 
accordingly ; but behold, as often as anyway, when they preached 
there was no particular sign that anybody was convinced. They, 
the people, listened to their sensible and warm-hearted young man, 
and were glad they had secured such a promising minister, at a price 
that they were able to pay, but as for proceeding to be converted, 
or to be perfectly sanctified, they did not. Well, if this discomfit- 
ure had been for one Sunday only, the man could have lived through 
it; but lo, it kept on. By and by, it began to occur to him that the 
law of Christian preaching might be, that it does not convert every 
soul instantly. Then he remembered that, in the School of Divinity, 
he had been taught how the heart of man is depraved and unwilling 
and hard to melt down, and soon. He recollected too, what he had 
heard many times, but never thought of, that the most successful 
ministers who ever lived, had more defeats than successes in this 
very matter of souls saved. Whitefield, Moody, Wesley leave a 
hundred times more people unconverted than they convert, in the 
places and mass-meetings where they speak. And as though to 
indicate to them that they must all expect just that, it is related of 
Jesus himself that whenever he spoke to men, the listening multi- 
tude divided, some saying yes and some saying no; and divided in 
no middle line ; moreover, the result being, even as Jesus expressed 
it: “ Many are called, but few chosen.” 

It seems strange that a person can live twenty to thirty years in 
the world, go through College, spend three years in a theological 
Seminary, hear a good many valuable lectures from a series of plain- 
spoken and warning men ; and yet commence to be a preacher with 
no practical sense of this thing that I am now telling ; so that he is 


YALE LECTURES. 323 


disappointed and chilled when his charges from the pulpit all the 
year long are so numerously resisted and not made the most of, by 
both saint and sinner ; but so it is—being told a thing is so curiously 
different from personally encountering it. 

To tell the truth, my young brethren, I myself struck a streak 
of disappointment right at this point. I did not find what I expected. 
I did not know that I expected it—we never know half that is in us 
—and one of the great uses of practical life is to bring us to a con- 
sciousness of our own contents, in the way of knowledge and the 
rest. I did not give up, but I could see how a man might at any 
rate, how he might slacken by and by, and deliver his strokes for 
conscience sake mostly ; or because it is the proper thing to do, 
according to all accounts. I think my teacher in theology helped 
me to a good deal of confidence in the power of mere argument. 
Of course he did not fail to inform me, that argument unassisted by 
God’s direct unction must be a failure, but he madé such an admir- 
able argument always himself, when he tried and withal had such 
a fine soldierliness in it, that made as I happen to be I could 
remember not much save that. I believed his doctrine of unction ; 
but as often comes to pass with beliefs, I folded it decently and 
respectfully away ; swore by it when called upon and proceeded to 
get along without it in a measure. Therefore, my fervor in preach- 
ing was in risk of ebbing, when I saw that all the world was not 
directly moved thereby. 

Again, some are cooled a little by the unexpected parishes in 
which they find themselves somehow—soon or late—small parishes 
—parishes not on the line of any railway or turnpike—parishes of 
limited salaries, limited church attendance, limited increase of chil- 
dren, limited vivacity and perhaps limited intelligence. They never 
supposed their merits ranked as low as that. They were bright 
enough in the Seminary, wrote good compositions, attended to their 
studies, were reasonably well spoken of, had a good voice, were easy 
and successful in their gestures, took their license in their pocket 
all their last year and went about preaching with what seemed 
acceptance at the time; and now, at the end of twenty years, they 
are lodged and seemingly stuck where there is neither railway, turn- 
pike, nor increase. Such a discrepancy between a man and his cir- 
cumstances no one can appreciate who has not been in it. And 
then the way it confuses a man’s mind! How did I get here, he 
says. What secret faculty, attribute or endowment in me, or set of 


324 YALE LECTURES. 


endowments was it, that caused me to be shoved along down and 
down, by not easy stages, to this place and doom. 

Dear Soul! that has happened to him, very possibly, which 
happens to men in every calling. He is a solidly meritorious 
person, just as he thinks he is. His head is excellent and his char- 
acter is excellent. But time and sufficient experiment have brought 
to light a constitutional disqualification in him for that particular 
service on the face of the earth, the service ministerial. Very likely 
it is a minute point ; but as the smallest kind of a sufficiently sharp 
tack in the bottom of a man’s shoe controls the whole situation and 
makes it necessary for him to get another shoe, so that little disquali- 
fication is the explanation of the mystery of that minister’s career. 
When I heard Cardinal Manning and listened to the victorious and 
far-reaching sniff that he gave whenever he made a thoroughly good 
point, I thought that for a settled preacher in a first-class position, 
he would hardly answer. A sniff is nothing. It does not disprove 
a person’s character. It does not show that he is not learned. able 
and godly enough to be a Cardinal ; but it might prevent his being 
a Cardinal, if the duties of that great office required him to stay on 
one spot forever, among the same set of people and in such close 
quarters that they could hear and could not fail to hear, every sniff 
he put forth—thousands in a year, perhaps. 

It would be ungracious in me to give a list of the many kinds 
of sniff that hinder men. It is some defect in the man’s oratory, 
perhaps ; it is something or other that you can hardly put your 
finger on in his manners ; it is his inborn proneness to doubt a thing 
which he has struggled against but has not yet extirpated; and his 
preaching, in various ways, is made unacceptable by that feature of 
his mind; or unconsciously he is dogmatic and conscientiously 
aggressive and can hardly sit five minutes in a parlor without coming 
at you with his battering ram ; his well-meant and Christian batter- 
ing ram, to be sure, and designed for your salvation ; nevertheless, 
you do not want any salvation that is brought in that way—depraved 
human nature being ridiculously particular about the way in which 
good is done to it. Or this good man is naturally very reserved and 
the modern parish insists on a good deal of effusiveness ; or while 
he is congenial to old people, he is not winning with the young—or 
to boil it all down into one sentence and state vaguely what I do not 
relish analyzing—he is not popular. It was supposed when he was . 
young that he was going to be popular; and he supposed he was ; 


YALE LECTURES. 325 


but no one then suspected the sharp tack that would begin to stick 
up in him, as parish after parish tried him on and wore him a little. 
So he is not as enthusiastic as he used to be. 

Again, and on the other hand, some ministers are so popular 
that, being much praised and stall-fed by their admiring parishion- 
ers, they grow fat, contented and dull and greatly need to be pricked 
by the sharp pricks of adversity. To be sure, when they get soggy 
enough, they are no longer popular; but what made them soggy 
was too much prosperity and pampering. Pampering tends to kill 
a man’s noble enthusiasm. 

Again, his early enthusiasm may grow tame by reason of his 
habitual contact as a preacher—his professional contact—with the 
truths of God and the things of God. All the time he moves among 
them ; all the time it is his business to handle them; all the time 
this necessary familiarity may reduce that lively sensibility in regard 
to them which he once knew. 

And again, a minister may unwittingly numb himself and settle 
into the deadness of rut-work and go by routine rather than by spon- 
taniety, by starting on his career with a not absolutely supreme 
intention to do good and let all considerations, personal to himself, 
go. ‘There is an opportunity for great self-deception just there, my 
brethren. I am not willing to believe that any man of you is con- 
scious at present of anything but a determination to do God’s work 
and not cherish yourself—not care more for salary than you do for 
souls—not delight in a brilliant parish call more than in a large 
opportunity to bless mankind. Theological students have a good 
deal of human nature in-them, but they are all honest to that extent. 
However, they are not all as sanctified as they may think they are. 
A quotable per centage of the students here and everywhere, will 
incline to use the parishes that call them and their opportunities as 
ministers, for their own advantage more than they ought. They are 
capable of that kind of alloy in their motives. They do not now dis- 
tinctly anticipate such works, but it will come. Well, they must 
fight against it. I presume all of them will. And one of the 
reasons why they had better is, that a service of God carried on - 
with that admixture of the personal element works tremendously 
to extinguish the characteristic enthusiams of the ministerial office ; 
and I can point you to men now living whose life is unhappy, who 
have a great deal to say against parishes and their meanness and 
their poor appreciation of what is done for them, and who discharge 


326 , YALE LECTURES. 


their official duties in a perfunctory torpidity and with just the joy 
of a man on a tread-mill, because they have slipped along into self- 
serving ; although it may be that even yet they are not quite aware 
of the slipping. 

I have now given you some specimens of the things that tame 
down the ministerial man from the beautiful ardor and expectation of 
his first sermon-work and pastor-work, into the round-and-round and 
around again, of a merely perfunctory fidelity. I have omitted, 
though, one of the frequent forces of dullness, namely :—the neces- 
sarily routine character of some of our work—and I have made the 
omission, because I want to discuss the formidable subject of rou- 
tine in another lecture. 

I have also omitted the depression which a good and faithful 
minister may feel when he notices the numerous Christian congre- 
gations that are captivated by shallow men in the ministry and men 
of no taste and mock orators and unserious men and men every 
way unseasoned, untempered, unregulated and uncalled of the Holy 
Ghost too, one would say. When a true minister is sick of such 
sights, he is led to inquire within himself, why should I offer my 
services to this unperceiving generation. Would that God would 
let me out into some pursuit and calling where a sterling man goes 
for what he is worth. So frequent has it come to be that people 
are bewitched by inferior ministerial gifts, that great popularity in a 
preacher almost creates a presumption against him, in serious and 
well-balanced souls, who know nothing of the man as yet, save the 
one thing that he is very popular. Mr. Ruskin hits the matter off, 
I remember, in one of his customary thrusts, by saying :—“a popular 
preacher is admired by the majority of his congregation for the 
worst parts of his sermon.”’ But let it go. I am glad to be through 
with this business of telling what depresses ministers and deadens 
them. For now IJ am ready to spread myself out on the things that 
nourish enthusiasm in a man and keep him alive, merry-hearted and 
aflame, notwithstanding all possible disadvantages and discour- 
agements. 

And first, the feasibility of a life-long chirkness and upbubbling 
of the soul, is settled by the many plain instances of the same. We 
look for some bubble in boys and beginners. It is natural to them. 
The force of life in them is not yet abated by the pull and the drain 
of multiplied years, and they have not come into the full stress and 
wear of affairs. But have we not all seen old boys in the ministry, 


YALE LECTURES. 327 


gray and worn men with a boy’s heart under their old jackets, a 
boy’s zeal, a boy’s dauntless expectation ; men that like to preach 
as well as they ever did, like to strive for souls, like to defend the 
truth, like to believe in the kingdom of God and its ultimate domin- 
ion? Why yes; and things like that are not uncommon in other 
professions and pursuits. There are aged lawyers whose passion 
for legal investigation and work is a supreme delight to them and 
much more than in the days of their youth. And scientists and 
musicians and teachers and business men, have a similar experi- 
ence; and even sheer money-getting, that pitiful blind lust for 
accumulation, often grows to an inextinguishable rage, as the years 
go on; so that the man goes out of the world at four or five score 
—no matter how old—with a money-eagerness still on the increase. 
If a secular pursuit, that in the nature of things cannot engage and 
inspire one-half of a man’s soul, may make him so indefatigable and 
so elate, so long as he lives ; and if a pursuit that is not only secular 
but directly cross and crash to everything fine, noble and spiritually 
pure in our nature, can keep a man alive, agog, industrious and 
devoted, so long as breath remains in his body; would it not be 
strange and infamous too, if ministers failed to reach a similar undy- 
ing zeal; stimulated as they are by the highest conceivable motives 
and fascinations. 

The lawyer, the scientist, the statesman, the philosopher, is led 
on, I will suppose, by his love of truth ; but consider the superiority 
of the truths that lead us on, as suited to inflame feeling and 
endeavor ; the truths of God and the truths of man as the child of 
God, foredoomed to immortality and chosen in Jesus Christ tc 
eternal life. Our truths stir us up and keep us going, by their very 
dimensions. It is no mere sharpness that we are called to in our 
studies, not microscopy, pettifogging, atomizing, however important 
they may be ; but it is to affairs of size, of out-stretching self-expan- 
sions, which ask for the grandest we can do. 

And another thing ; some might think that this very size that 
I speak of, in the truths we pursue, must prevent our getting far 
into them and therefore-must tend to daunt endeavor and depress - 
the mind’s natural ardor ; but we, who are in the business, know it 
~isnotso. A great truth is much more stimulating than little truths. 
Moreover, we do get in to them by our labors. We find out one thing 
after another in the field of religion and the field of theology ; partly 
because things actually new are brought to light now and then and 


328 | YALE LECTURES. 


partly because the very old truths which we have always known and 
the Church has always known, are freshened to our apprehension in 
such wise as to seem new. How common it is for Bible readers 
and students, to have texts that they learned in childhood, have run 
against and considered a hundred times since and have often 
expounded to others, suddenly star forth before them like meteors, 
and fill them with divine delight. Along the horizon of every 
inquiring and devout mind, there is always a flicker and a glow, as 
of truths yet hidden behind the hills ; and the expectancy thus kept 
alive and the deep questioning, are among the most sterling joys of 
our life. How reprehensible and dreadful is that minister who, in 
the midst of such possibilities and called daily to handle and apply 
the truth of truths, can humdrum and gradually die down into just 
a respectable automaton ! 

Passing now to a point under the head of supports for a minis- 
ter’s enthusiasm, I mention something very fundamental indeed ; 
something which alone is more than sufficient for any amount of 
perseverance, high-heartedness and increase of joy. I refer to that 
sense of mission which we may all have and one as much as another. 
In so far as your call to the ministry and your mission to men from 
God, is by you simply inferred from your mental endowments, your 
proficiency in scriptural and other learning, your ability to address 
assemblies, your circumstances in life and the verdict of an ecclesi- 
astical council, assembled to pass upon your case and send you out 
humanly authenticated, multitudes of men may have a better call 


than you. Their gifts, acquisitions and external furtherances, may _ 


be more than yours ; and the council that inspected them may have 
worked itself up to a more rousing majority than your council could 
see its way to; and even if your council was unanimous about you, 
possibly it was one of those luke-warm, guess-work and charitable 
unanimities, that are fair to look upon outwardly, but within. are 
only so-so. 

But there is one form of callin the which you need not be 
beaten by mortal man, be he never so brilliant and the darling of his 
council ; your access to God and God’s access to you, the mutual 
approach of you and God, is just as open, direct and assured as can 
be another’s ; and that which is the ultimate factor in all real calls 
—the soul’s message and commission from God direct, private and 


inaccessible to all inspection by bystanders, doubters, critics, well- 


wishers and inquiring councils—that may be yours perfectly. Many 





YALE LECTURES. 329 


a man has it and so may you. And while I would not advise a 
young man to refuse the ministry because this his inward summons 
from God had not yet come to be quite irresistible ; the fact being 
that many an excellent and successful minister has gone to his work 
without that clear inward foreordination that he desired at the time ; 
yet I would say to you, that when a man has reached the thick and 
thunder of life’s battle, or say, when the great waters that are fain to 
drown him, strangle his zeal, kill his vigor, put out all his fires and 
water-log him generally, are rolling in, there is no dam against them 
more heaven-high and solid that he can raise, than his constant 
remembrance how when he first went out on this business of trying 
to save souls, he did not send himself, and was not sent by man in 
the main, and was not pushed in by a lot of conspiring circum- 
stances, but was sweetly constrained by the spirit of all grace. And 
so constrained it would have been the woe of his life if he had 
not gone in; so constrained too, that he could have withstood, (so 
he felt at the time), the lack of all customary external furtherances ; 
and perhaps even the adverse finding of a fallible human council. 
How such a memory as that lights up a poor, tried minister’s soul 
and keeps him warm and elate forever. There is nothing perfunctory 
about him and cannot be. 

But as I intimated, many (and perhaps a majority,) are in the 
ministerial office with no such supreme off-send to fall back on 
when life grows heavy, when the parish is small and away from the 
turnpike, when they find they are not orators and when perhaps 
even their personal godliness seems mysteriously to have less weight 
with the populace that they would have supposed it must. They 
may be truly called ; that is, they are in the vocation where they 
ought to be; and yet they did not secure, when they started, quite 
that call in the soul to which I have referred ; and now what shall 
they do? ; 

I should reason on their case in this way. It is not wonderful 
that they missed that special, luminous, self-evidencing, never-to-be- 
forgotten call, at the beginning of their official career. “They were 
young—young in every respect. They did not realize the worth | 
of such a call and therefore did not seek for it so earnestly as they 
might. They had not learned the secret of full converse with God. 
In their exuberant young energy they did not conceive the miser- 
able uselessness of all human energies, however exuberant, aside 
from the spirit of God. Most men have to do their natural best 


330 YALE LECTURES. 


and be baffled a thousand times, before they can learn that one 
thing. It is not wonderful then, I say, that these ministers have not 
a first-class “call”? to remember and ground on and get daily 
strength from. 

But now they have had experience. The futility of man’s forth- 
puttings to do God’s works, they have learned from many a defeat. 
Contrariwise, the triumph of the feeblest forth-puttings, if only God 
assists, they have also learned ; by an occasional experience of their 
own and by a good deal of watching of ungifted but consecrated 
brethren, they have learned the way of prayer. The path between 
them and their God is trodden bare with their footsteps. So now 
they are in a way to get a call for themselves. They need not strike 
out for a great general call to cover their entire remaining life, such 
a call as a young man before he begins may naturally seek. No, let 
them push for a smaller thing than that, a thing, at any rate, more 
detailed and close at hand. For instance: let them refuse to preach 
on any given occasion till God distinctly gives them the sermon for 
that occasion—the topic—the text—the handling of the topic. 
Let them insist on that specific call. It is a pretty cheap minister 
that never had a sermon given him. And if he can have one, he 
can have a thousand and every one. The God that gave the one 
can give the rest. The man that got the one, can get the rest. The 
secret that brought the one, will bring them numberless and sure ; 
and the secret that brought the sermon, will bring anything. For 
instance, the minister can have his public prayer given him, or the 
private word of counsel he is going to speak, or the settlement of 
the numerous practical questions that come up in the course of his ~ 
ministry, as easily as he can have his sermon given. And_all these 
givings from God are specific calls of God. Hence, when a man 
moves out to a particular thing on a call, he moves strong ; and he 
is happy and he tends to believe in the ministerial office ; and he 
thinks a parish off from the turnpike is worth saving and might fitly 
occupy the gifts of an archangel. When some deacon of his, with 
a strong and penetrating mind and frank and conscientious habit of 
speech and a due sense of his official importance, tells him that he 
did not enjoy his sermon, did not approve of it and did not think 
he was impressive in its delivery ; although the minister is mortified 
at first and confused in his mind, nevertheless, presently it comes to 
him that he got that sermon from God, on his knees—on his knees 
more than once—on his knees every day while he was writing it he 


YALE LECTURES. 331 


was speaking with God and God was speaking with him ; and while 
he was sitting at his table making his pen go, hunting for scriptural 
references, looking at his commentaries, doing his work, his soul 
felt itself to be feasting—it was feasting—God feasted him ; and in 
that way constantly God undersigned his name to that sermon—and 
aman with all this recollection and assurance in him, can stand ten 
deacons—ten perspicacious deacons. And the beauty of it is, he 
can stand them, not as withstanding them, not combatively, not 
resentfully, but receptively, genially and in that prudent spirit of 
silence, which is so wholesome always in a parish. Why should this 
minister make contention, or feel hurt, over a matter on which God 
has definitely spoken to him. The minister may be mistaken about 
God’s part in that sermon—to mistake is human—but probably he 
is not mistaken. He is no more likely to be mistaken than he is in 
any other quite plain thing. However, all I want to inculcate along 
here, is the general idea of the practicability and the usefulness of 
calls as numerous as the numerous details of a minister’s daily life 
and labors ; and emphatically do I wish to lift up and magnify these 
specific habitual calls, as a first-rate antidote for the dejections, or 
forces of dejection, inherent in our office; and the much more 
multiplied dejections that are not inherent in the office, but are let 
in and lugged in by ministers themselves; and are thrust in by 
perverse or misjudging men and women on the outside. 

It is often that ministers find their circumstances rather deso- 
late—their deacons too perspicacious—their congregations too full 
of old roots of bitterness ; their own oratory too feeble and their 
salaries as feeble as their oratory. But none of these things move 
them, ot diminish their industry, fire and hope, provided all along 
through the stretches of desolation, God drops in His clear, sweet 
calls and calls, like bells out of the sky, and fills the souls of his 
servants with the great music of them. | 

But now, thirdly ; close along side of what I have been saying, 
comes this thought ; a man in close practical converse with God, in 
the manner just explained, is instinctively hopeful, warm and 
undaunted and unable to be sunk in his spirit by any criss-cross of — 
circumstances. It is not a matter of reasoning, thus—“ This ser- 
mon of mine was unquestionably given to me by my God, because 
I besought him ; therefore I stand to it, deacon or no deacon and 
rejoice therein”—no, the matter of which I now speak is much 
less argumentative than that and much more mystical. It is this the 

24. 


332 YALE LECTURES. 


man, by virtue of his habitual, close terms with God in the work of 
getting his numberless calls, is unwittingly lifted up into a real 
partnership in God’s own repose and sanguine expectation ; and 
so, when the deacon speaks to him, or when the general work of 
God moves on tediously in his parish, under his administration, or 
the individual soul that he has labored with for weeks cannot be 
won ; or his people get tired of his preaching and want him to move 
‘on, or what is worse, because vaster, when the cause of salvation is 
stayed, or even retrograde throughout a whole nation and perchance 
throughout the world ; he has no feeling that these things are of any 
permanent moment; he knows all the same that the kingdom of 
God stands sure; that the lion of the tribe of Judah is to conquer ; 
that his own dead parish is not forsaken ; that yonder long-sought 
person in his parish is not doomed ; that other days of grace are to 
come. And somehow—he cannot explain how—as respects those 
not few personal instances to which salvation will certainly never 
reach, he is not cast down in just the way he should have supposed 
he would be; he is sorry but he is not desperate ; it is something 
as though the persons were to be saved after all ; and in like manner, 
his own unexpectedly small and inefficacious ministry does not 
make him melancholy, not that exactly ; for perhaps it will add up 
at the last better than he fears; the reports are not all in yet and 
they will not be till the day of judgment; in any case, he simply 
cannot find it in his heart to take on about it, as though there 
were no God and no God’s providence. He does not reason it out, 
I say once more, but no matter, the peace flows into him and the 


joy and the enthusiasm ; he can find few rational considerations to ~ 


support it, perchance, at present, but it does not need such support ; 
it comes of itself—or to fall back to my original explanation, a man 
in daily converse with God, a man full of God’s calls and God’s 
personal dealings, by the nature of the case doth participate in 
God’s own inscrutable serenity as he looks from his throne down 
on these same unnumbered, wide-spread deplorables of many kinds. 

Now, brethren, I must give you another strong old recipe for 
Jassitude, perfunctoriness and the numbness of routine in clerical 
people. This recipe now coming, does not operate on the outside 
of the difficulty. It does not comfort the numb minister by telling 
him how he can get his salary raised, or how he can make some 


eligible parish call him away from the uninteresting old spot where. 


he now is, or anything of that kind; but like all good recipes, it 


— i a 





YALE LECTURES. 333 


moves straight in on his joints, marrow and reins and totally revo- 
lutionizes his inward parts. Let me open the matter in this way. 
St. Paul speaks of our fellowship of Christ’s sufferings, and now what 
were those sufferings. They were these. 

First, his self-denial when he left his primal state and incor- 
porated himself in our lowly fiesh and became subject to earthly 
conditions. 

Next, he took the burden of our dreadful case on to his sympa- 
thetic feeling, thus bearing our sins as no man or angel could begin 
to, because neither man or angel is deep enough in his sensibilities, 
and because he is not comprehensive enough, either intellectually or 
morally, to gather in the details of our lot and doom, in their entire 
number and their entire size. 

Next, in that which has come to be known, preeminently, as 
the passion of Jesus, there was an unsearchable transaction between 

him and his (and our) God, wherein he was dealt with and consented 
to be dealt with and rejoiced to be dealt with, in a manner full of 
agony for him, but full of deliverance for us—a transaction which has 
been always both the fascination and the despair of theology :—a 
transaction too around which the innumerable company of non- 
expert thinkers and Christians have flocked, as though they all knew, 
by their regenerated intuitions, that in the bosom of that mystery 
somewhere, the crucial somewhat of their salvation was wrought. 
But no matter about explanatiéns and waiving everything save one 
thing, I say, Jesus did suffer for us, substitutionally and mediatorially. 

And now, as to our fellowship with him, in the three august 
particulars of his suffering, just named ; his suffering by incarnation, 
his suffering by sympathy and his suffering in the mystery of the 
cross. I need not argue that as regards incarnation and the suf- 
fering thereof he must stand forever alone, no mortal being able to 
share it; and as regards his crucifixion and the substitutional and 
propitiatory suffering, in that he must, in the nature of the case, 
stand forever alone ; so that the only remaining particular or point 
at which such as we can follow him is his sympathetic deep concern 
for men. And even there, we can only follow him afar off; but we . 
can follow him—yes, what he felt we can feel in kind, and it is one 
of the earmarks of our regeneration if we do. 

And this concern for men, this Christ-like concern, does not 
concentrate wholly or mainly on man as an embodied this-world, 
temporal creature ; a being that needs to be fed, clothed, housed, 


334 ; YALE LECTURES. 


educated and decorously buried ; that sort of sympathy is humanita- 
rianism and while Jesus was a humanitarian, that was not at all the 
unique feature in his character, function and career. Jesus addressed 
himself to man as a spiritual personage and spiritually fallen; and 
whereinsoever he was sympathetically crushed by our lot, that was 
the great point of the crush ; and it belongs to us to enter his fel- 
lowship precisely there ; and a minister is no minister, but only a 
lecturer and secularist, until he has entered there. And it lies in 
the line of my subject to-day to add, that the minister who enters 
there and there sympathetically expatiates, or as some would express 
it, the minister who loves souls, aches for them, works for them, 
storms heaven for them and has them for the spinal cord of his 
whole official activity, is habitually full of joy, push and spiritual 
seership, and can no more be dampened and made a professional 
routinist and stick, than can God’s angels. 

The only objection I have to that traditional phraseology, “love 
for souls,” as a description of our fellowship with Christ in his suf- 
fering sympathy with men, is that it is not broad enough. “Love 
for souls” and “love for men,” are by no means equivalent and 
interchangeable phrases. A man is more than asoul. A man isa 
soul and a body, with all that implies. And Jesus did not come to 
save souls any more truly than he came to save bodies, with all their 
belongings, conditions and inferences. The gist of the doctrine of 
the resurrection on one principal side of it, is that Jesus assumed the 
human body, in its limitation, disability and wreck ; took it down 
into the tomb, where by right it belonged, under the old sentence, 


—‘ The wages of sin is death,” and rose with it, transubstantiated — 


into a body, spiritual, invulnerable, incorruptible and immortal ; and 
that when he thus rose, or more accurately, when, after forty days 
of lingering here, he ascended to the right hand of God, he shed 
forth the Holy Ghost as he had promised he would, to start the prac- 
tical recovery of our souls and our bodies ; our souls right away and 
our bodies when the good time comes ; that recovery of our bodies 
being sure to be a repetition, limb for limb and line for line, of the 
recovery of his own body, when he emerged from the grave, tran- 
substantiated, spiritual, invulnerable, incorruptible and immortal. 
It is not good theology then, to say “love for souls,”—that is if you 
would be precise. It is not always necessary to be precise ; but if 
we evangelical men complain of humanitarians that they omit the 
souls of men from their anxieties and endeavors, we, on our part, 


— ee 


YALE LECTURES. 335 


must take care not to fall into a similar pit and omit the bodies of 
men from our concern, our theology and our benevolent forth-put- 
tings. ‘There is at present a confused push of undiscriminating 
persons in the Christian Church against the resurrection of the body. 
They think it is more spiritual and refined to ignore bodies and not 
let the Christian salvation save them ; but the “vile body,” that St. 
Paul tells about, is no viler than the vile soul that lives in it—not a 
whit—and if you are to be so over refined and fastidious, you must 
ignore souls too. The fact is, the blessed Jesus addressed himself 
to souls and bodies both. He took us in our total, double-phased 
vileness ; and he raises us in mass, as sunken ships are raised. In 
his person to-day, at the right hand of God, we have a glorified 
man, soul and body both, the perfect type in that respect and the 
forerunner of the resurrection hosts that will pour into that same 
holy presence at the last ; all with their bodies on albeit in such a 
bodily transmutation, transfiguration and effulgence, as will make us 
all turn in memory to this description of Jesus on the mount of his 
transfiguration. ‘‘The fashion of his countenance was altered, his 
face did shine as the sun and his raiment became shining, exceeding 
white as snow, so as no fuller on earth can white them.” Is there 
lack of refinement here ? 

The evangelical love for men then is what we ministers need 
in order to life-long, spontaneous workfulness and high spirit. I 
call it ‘‘ evangelical” love in order to indicate two things ; that it is 
another better and bigger thing than were humanitarian love; and 
that it is a God-born love, and is not natural. The Holy Ghost puts 
it into our hearts. And the one disability of some ministers is, that 
such distinctly supernatural love has never been put into them, and 
is not the spring whence their countless ministrations among men 
flow forth. They are proper persons. They behave. They dress 
rigidly in black suits. They call on their parishidners. They visit 
the sick. They are kind to the poor. They are very decorative on 
a ceremonial occasion. They uphold philanthropies, reforms, sound 
politics and those well-ordered conventionalities whereon the peace 
of the world reposes. There is a rustle of respectability in all their _ 
garments. And they accomplish much good, too. If we had never 
heard of a higher good than they ever accomplished, we should have 
said, they are doing well and none can do better. But there is 
a higher good. While you are thinking of such a minister as that 
and his fine image is before you, just say over in your mind, “ the 


336 YALE LECTURES. 


fellowship of Christ’s sufferings—the fellowship of Christ’s suffer- 
ings,’ Say it over again and again till you and the other in 
question are enveloped in the atmosphere of it and he begins to 
be judged by its judgment and his round of service gets measured 
thereby ; and see if he does not begin to shrink before you and 
sound hollow comparatively and hardly seem a Christian minister 
after all. 

I speak sharply because the subject is a radical one. The one 
trouble of all disheartened ministers is that they have fallen out, or 
were never in, the fellowship of Christ’s sufferings. It is enough to 
discourage any one, (the poor disheartened man says), not to have 
more converts, more hearers, more salary, more books, more rail- 
road facilities, more proximity to the metropolis, than have I. Well 
sir, if you had in you the evangelical love for men and the soul- 
travail of the Lord Jesus, you would have all things, just as St. Paul 
said concerning himself, “as having nothing, and yet possessing all 
things.” 

But brethren, loving men in the evangelical way, as distin- 
guished from the humanitarian, is not the easiest thing in the world, 
but rather, is always a hard and unnatural thing ; and therefore this 
serious question comes up: How shall we ministers get the love in 
question? Many of us are constitutionally sluggish in our emotions 
and unaffectionate. We may be pretty brainy and may therefore 
have a never-dying interest in subjects and in the unfolding of sub- 
jects in the pulpit ; an interest that, taken in connection with our 
superior allotment of brains, makes able essayists of us and men a 


good deal admired ; but as regards love to men, we are not gifted. . 


You may be a humanitarian by birth, thousands are; but no one 
was ever born an evangelical man-lover. Moreover, the men them- 
selves that we are to make a business of loving are extremely 
ineligible cases, as likely'as not. Anybody can be a pretty fair lover 
if he may select his persons; but the dreadful thing about this 
whole matter of evangelical loving is, that the more unlovely the 
man or the woman, the more ardent and attached are we required 
to be. There we are; and what are we going to do about it? 

In replying to that, I go to the very foundation of the difficulty 
at the start—I have done it already, in a passing way, but I wish to 
do it formally and saliently now—and to say, that spiritual fervor 


towards men, which is our most resplendent endowment as minis- | 


ters of the Gospel, has its beginning and its eternal fountain in a 





a ee 


YALE LECTURES. 337 


personal experience of Christ for our own selves, by the Holy Ghost ; 
a personal experience begun, kept up and daily renewed on and on. 
If a man cannot say, I am crucified with Christ—I am dead to sin 
and the world, and day by day I die to it, am dead and am buried, 
something after the strong manner of St. Paul, then he has no 
yearning over anybody, no motion within him to save his fellow men, 
no evangelical love. He may have natural love in quantities, any 
quantity ; enough to make of him an excellent humanitarian ; but 
this other great kind of love, this greatest of all kinds, he knows 
nothing about. 

But I will suppose the minister has had his personal experience 
of Christ—his regeneration, in fact, by the Holy Ghost—that to 
begin with ; and that his experience of salvation is daily renewed 
within him, so that therefore, love to men is at last natural to him. 
Then next all along by study and meditation on the subject, he may 
enlarge his conception of man, of his rank among created things, of 
his very great dimensions, of his indefinite capacity for personal 
expansion, his ability to suffer and to enjoy, his eternal inability to 
go out of existence, the enormous ransom that has been paid down 
for him, his salvability to the uttermost, under the terms of that 
ransom, his present uncleanness and his possible holiness; his 
present spiritual debility and inaptitude and his possible vigor ; his 
present weariness and disrelish and: frequent despair in all moral 
action and his possible spontaneity therein ; his present dreadful 
selfishness towards his fellows and his possible concord and affection 
towards thém ; his present profound affiliation with the kingdom of 
evil and his possible affiliation with the kingdom of God—and when 
the minister in these ways of meditation has reached an ample idea 
of man, an irresistible loving concern for him springs up in his soul ; 
and in all he does as preacher or pastor, he is made ardent, ener- 
getic and positively supernatural—while in this exalted passion, it is 
all but impossible for him to think of such a matter as his own salary 
and the size of his congregation, and the location of his parish, and 
the small power of his own oratory and the swarm of little dejections 
that fill the air like summer gnats and try to make an unhappy, - 
complaining, tormented creature of him. They simply cannot do it, 

It is related of many Christian martyrs, how they literally did 
not feel the fires that burned them up. I suppose there is good 
physiology for that and good psychology. And our martyrdoms in 
third-rate parishes, our personal exposure to able-bodied deacons 


338 YALE LECTURES. 


and others, our conscious lack of natural gifts, our lack, perhaps, of 
educational gifts, our unoratorical way of speaking, (the best we can 
do, but nothing to boast of), our curious capacity, it may be, to 
throw a coldness over the meeting when we go about in society, 
(one would need to write a volume to rehearse all the inadequa- 
cies of our tribe ; their real inadequacies, their imputed and alleged 
inadequacies and that still larger class of inadequacies which are 
neither real nor imputed, but are imagined by ourselves on the Mon- 
days of each week ;) concerning the whole multitude of these, as 
the martyrs mentioned were sublimed by the cause they died for, in 
such wise that they did not know their hurts ; so our devotion to the 
ends of the ministry, our love for those for whom Jesus died, will 
at least minimize the disadvantages whereunto we may be appointed, 
and lead us to thank God every day that he was willing to put us 
into the service of his Son. 

Now, my dear young men, I want to stop here, on this whole- 
some high upland which we have reached after some climbing ; 
but for the sake of a complete statement, I will take you down to a 
low place and say unto you, that a minister truly devoted to the 
high ends of his calling, as just now explained, will be likely to have 
all the temporal furtherances he really needs, all the admiration he 
can stand, and calls from parishes loud enough, as likely as not, to 
imperil his soul. Amen. 


LEGITIMATE ELEMENTS OF 
VARIETY IN CHURCH SERVICE. 


I pass to-day to a consideration of the legitimate elements of 
variety in the public services of the Church. 

And when I say, legitimate elements, I intend in some wise a 
slant at the elements. illegitimate that have been known to slip in, 
on a Call from itching ears and itching eyes and that general itch of 
the mind, which a certain very reputable writer hit off and made 
immortal, when he said, ‘All the -Athenians and strangers which 
were there, spent their time in nothing else but either to tell or 
to hear some new thing.” Modern life is much more diversi- 
fied and complex than life in the old time was.. There are more 
books to read, more theatres, operas, concerts, circuses, menag- 
eries and side-shows to attend ; more expansiveness, multiformity, 
glitter, gorgeousness and dizziness of social life; swarms of re-— 
formatory movements, from the salvation of drunkards and street 
Arabs, to the betterment of the dress of women ; more clubs, guilds, 
and conspiracies ; more new-born ologies to investigate and be able 
to pass an examination upon—all these spicy inventions have to be 
supported and continually replenished with fresh victims And at 
the top of everything, stands that admirable modern monster, the 
daily newspaper, to see that nobody goes to sleep in this miscella- 
neous business of living and taking in all these varieties and inter- 
esting phenomena, which are massed in the ample spaces of the first- 
class journal; massed, described, spun out, ornamented and some- 
times illustrated with wood-cuts, so that even children cry for them ; 
and by the time Sunday comes and these rather jaded and sometimes, 
blase multitudes of people who have been thus profusely entertained 
during the week, are assembled in the Sanctuary to have their souls © 


340 : YALE LECTURES. 


saved ; I tell you, they know a dull service from one stirring ; they 
want you to put on all your steam and blow your whistle in every 
conceivable pitch. What they most delight in, is to have you tell 
them in their Saturday’s newspaper exactly what your entertainment 
is to be; the subject of the sermon, the musical programme, the 
particular singers on duty for that day, who the preacher is and all 
about it. A manful resistance to this pressure is kept up by 
numerous old fogies—a considerably despised and useful class ; and 
by force of them, aided to some extent by the better parts of the 
Athenians themselves, who like a wide-awake life for six days, but 
do not object to a comparatively peaceful harbor on the seventh ; 
by the combination of all possible forces I say, the house of God is 
preserved in a good degree of sanctity in many places ; the ancient 
approved services go on for substance; and only such departures 
from old-fashioned ways are permitted, as God will wink at, pre- 
sumably, in view of the hardness of our hearts and the weakness of 
our frame and the beggarly elements whereof we are composed in 
both soul and body. But it is not as it was, when the New England 
ministers could preach an hour and then preach another hour; 
and could even pray an hour and on particular occasions make 4 
service six hours long, with never a particle of sensational material 
in it all, nor one word put in for mere entertainment’s sake, from 
beginning to end, nor a single thing done to ease the strain of strict 
attention, or to comfort the stationary and fixed mortal bodies of 
those fine old Puritans. Those daysare gone. Somehow they have 


left us. And now men lecture on the legitimate elements of variety _ 


in tne public services of the Church, as though the Athenian great- 
grandsons of those same iron-built fathers must be humored in their 
desire for varied—not to say variegated—exercises in the Sanctuary. 

My brethren, I am not going to surrender anything important 
to this outcry for ease and entertainment in the house and worship 
of God, but I will indicate certain points where it is not impossible 
to introduce that diversity which even the most sanctified souls do 
really enjoy ; and more than that, turn it to good spiritual account. 
Let it be granted that in certain great staples, public worship is to be 
the same, unchangeable forever ; as, that it is to be made up of prayer, 
praise musically expressed, Scriptural readings, preaching and the 
several ordinances which the Scriptures make binding on us; and 


that these solid terms and details of any and every service are to be © 


strung along in an outline order, which must be approximately the 


YALE LECTURES. 34] 


same for all time ; let so much as that be conceded (as it will be by 
people who think the subject out) ; and then the several easements 
that may be let in for soul and body, are something like the fol- 
lowing. 

First, as our bodies naturally abhor a fixed posture if it is too 
long continued, and as a body full of abhorrence can greatly discom- 
pose the man in it and spoil his worship, it is best that our services 
should call for quite a little change of posture as they move on. If 
a service is properly organized, it will require diversified bodily 
movements. ‘There is a congregation of sensible people, for whom 
I have sometimes officiated, that unanimously keep to their seats 
and rise not at all, until the singing of the last hymn; and they do 
not rise then on any feeling that God’s praise should not be sung 
down-sitting, rather than in a posture of special reverence ; for if 
any such feeling was in them they would rise at the several times 
when his praise is sung in the earlier parts of the hour—no, they 
rise, partly because it seems about time so to do, and partly because 
once up, they are already to march out and lose no time, so soon 
as the benediction. which immediately follows the hymn, is spoken. 
Now that people are continually violating one of the solemn proprie- 
ties of God’s house—inconsiderately of course, for they are a rever- 
ent people. They bow their headsin prayer. That address to God 
they take some sense of. Why then, do they not sense it when they 
move out towards God in song and make some bodily testimony 
corresponding, and thereby take some of the physical tediousness 
out of their service ? 

I have been in assemblies, a very few, where, when I said, 
“Let us pray,” scarcely any one went down at all. There they sat, 
as stiff-set as though head-bowing might lead on to some formalism. 
They were good enough people, most of them, but they had not 
given attention to the very axioms of right action before God. 
Posture is nothing and piety is everything, I presume they would 
say, if being challenged on the subject, they had the pluck to say 
anything. 

When the officiating clergyman in the Protestant Episcopal 
Service, begins, “ Dearly beloved brethren, the Scripture moveth us,” 
and so forth, the dearly beloved brethren in question get upon their 
feet to hear what he may have to say; and they do it because it is 
more decent to stand when you are addressed by a person in a 
formal way ; and they ought therefore to stand through the sermon, 


342 YALE LECTURES. 


if it were practicable. I have never carefully examined the printed 
services of the great liturgical bodies, to see whether every bodily 


change therein required is founded on the nature of the particular — 


act performed at each change, but I presume it is. Those liturgical 
Christians, taken all together, have made some study of such things 
and their worshipful practices are apt, to that extent, to be rationally 
grounded. ‘The minister kneels in the prayers for the same reason 
that the congregation do ; because he then comes into the presence 
of God and speaks to him; but in the Absolution he stands and 
they remain kneeling, because he is then God’s spokesman to them 
and God’s gift-bringer, while they are recipients from God, through 
him. 

This matter is full of detail, but the main thing I am after in 
referring to it at all, is to bring out before you one particular where- 
in the public service may have some elasticity and not amount to a 
bodily imprisonment, especially to young children. When you sing, 
stand up, or do something to show that you know you have come 
to another turn in the ongo of the worship. When the prayer has 
been reached, bow down, or else stand up, as our fathers did—either 
way is Scriptural, at least do something. When you receive the 
benediction, bow your head, unless you are so stiff a congregationalist 
and so afraid of admitting the priesthood of the ministry, that you 
cannot conscientiously take an attitude which says that something 
did really come from God to you through that speaking man’s— 
“The Lord bless you”—floating down from the pulpit. When the 
choir are singing their piece, you must settle for yourself what you 
had better do then. Theoretically they are praising God, very 


likely speaking for you in the matter, because you have never © 


learned the fine, etherial language they are using, in order to speak 


for yourself; and therefore, it would seem you ought to stand up, ~ 


just as you bow in prayer with the minister when he theoretically 
voices your prayer for you. And by these several corporeal flexi- 
bilities, you shall not merely adjust yourself to the varying realities 
and the obvious decorums of the occasion, but do something to 
save yourself from a feeling of monotonousness in the church 
worship. | 

Again, the minister can introduce certain reliefs, by cultivating 
a reasonable variety in the tones of his voice and a reasonable ver- 
safility in his gestures, too, I may add. Perhaps you will feel that I 
am detaining you on minimum particulars now, and I do not myself 


YALE LECTURES. 343 


suppose that tones and gestures in a preacher are so momentous 
as piety. A man cannot get into heaven by the lift of his own ora- 
tory, so fast as he can by the lift of his own piety. Still when he 
comes to the tug of lifting others into that bright haven, the awful 
fact is, that voice and a few apparently small things of that sort, are 
among the maxima of personal influence. It is one of the unescap- 
able disadvantages of preachers as compared with all other orators, 
that their subjects of discourse, being uniformly grave ones, and not 
unfrequently even terrible subjects, tend towards and almost compel 
solemn vocal tones, and also easily carry a man into cadenced tones, 
otherwise called ‘“sing-song.’’ That mellifluous embroidering of 
grave tones which our church organists practice, we preachers can- 
not emulate, for we use an organ of only one pipe—though a pipe 
of much range—and then, if the truth must be told, ministers are 
more serious men than organists, on the average, and before God do 
not dare put even their one pipe through all its possible variations, 
when they preach. However, we must shun monotony. Other 
things being equal, that will at least double the length of our pas- 
torate. I have been in this evil world longer than you have, young 
men, and that is one of the things I have discovered. 

As to monotonous gestures, those appear only on those men 
who have given careful attention and a good deal of practice to 
delivery. Probably they have been in the hands of some teacher of 
oratory, have learned rules of gesture and have studiously made 
gestures in private. I heard a minister of some name and some pith, 
repeat, memoriter, a thoroughly elaborated, doctrinal sermon, an 
hour long ; and knowing his memoriter habit, I expected to notice 
that he said the same words that he did before ; but I declare unto 
you, he made the same gestures all through—for, all the principal 
gestures, the absolutely killing ones, I could definitely recollect. 
They were good and they came in all along at exactly the same 
points as on the first occasion. You might say, if they were at the 
right points on the first occasion, why should they be changed to the 
wrong points on the second for the sake of variety ; and perhaps I 
could not answer you, but I could suggest and I would suggest, that 
a certain effect of monotony cannot be escaped if preachers are 
going to cut-and-dry things in that manner. Cutting-and-drying, 
when carried beyond a certain line, becomes what is known a 
mannerism ; and did you ever know anybody who liked mannerism 
when he really took a full sense of the thing? Vary your voices 


344 ; YALE LECTURES. 


then, gentlemen, so much as circumstances will permit, and when 
you come to giving us gestures, let us have a diversiform assort- 
ment. Let up on your solemnity a bit, for the time being, if you 
cannot make your voice flexile otherwise; and give us a change 
from gestures, even in the form of non-gesturing for a space, so 
that we may the more relish your prepared, proper and infallible 
gestures, when you get back to them. 

Thirdly, do not make your services monotonous in and by 
your strong push for unity in the service. I spoke to some of you 
here two years ago, of a Communion service I had attended just 
before, wherein the able and well-known man who conducted it, 
came near being the death of us, because in his Invocation at the 
start, he took us straight to the Holy table and to the centermost 
and most heart-moving realities of it; and then in his choice of the 
hymn immediately following, did the same thing ; and then read an 
intense Scripture in the same line and then prayed at length, on the 
same subject, mostly ; and preached on it three quarters of an hour 
and then called us to sing one of the fervid, good hymns on the 
Passion of the Lord; and finally invited the meagre remainders of 
our feeling to warm up to what was really the focus of the occasion ; 
though as you see, that focus had been by him carried back out of 
its place to the opening act of the service—the Invocation—and 
from that had been kept moving along down through all the details 
of the worship, a perpetually present and traveling thing. The man 
or woman in the pew, who had moved through the foregoing parts 
of the exercises that day with only a languid enlistment of his or her 
feeling—or possibly with no enlistment at all—could accept that 
invitation to warm up when the table was at last reached ; but I, 
who had been fool enough to start off with the minister in his Invo- 
cation and warm up there and be as over-quick as he was; and 
thereafter had kept warmed up every time he asked me to; I, be it 
said had come to the end of my responsiveness ; and what he did 
at the blessed table was of comparatively no account to me. I 
was as empty as a last year’s nest. I had been privileged to be 
present and assist at a magnificent instance of unity, but it was 
one of those cases referred to by the late Duke of Wellington, 
where a victory is worse than a defeat. 

Brethren, unity is not incompatible with variety. I have care- 
fully counted the separate and different particulars of that Sunday. 
morning’s transaction ; and I find there were eleven of them, if not 


YALE LECTURES. 345 


twelve—enough, in conscience, to have secured the most ample 
diversity. And the way to secure it, was to make the seven partic- 
ulars that antedated the administration of the Supper, just range the 
utmost permissible limits of the inner circles of the Christian religion. 
There was no need to go out of sight of Calvary and the Cross, 
No; it was necessary on that occasion to keep near to it in hymn, 
prayer, Bible lesson and sermon ; but if the minister had made his 
Invocation (that which Invocations always should be), an asking of 
God’s blessing on that Service then begun, (that and nothing more) 
and the hymn following, a magnification of the Lord’s day ; and the 
Scriptural lesson a history of the origin of the Jewish passover (that 
for example), and the succeeding long prayer, as rangey a thing as 
prayer ever has the conscience to be; and the sermon a root dis- 
cussion of self-sacrifice, from the text—‘ Verily, verily, I say unto 
you, except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth 
alone, but if it die it bringeth forth much fruit,”—if these had been 
the preliminaries, would they not have been in perfect unity with 
the ceremony to follow; and yet would any decent man have had 
the least sense of being tired on account of monotony? 

So at a funeral, if that happens which I have sometimes known 
to happen, that three prayers are offered by two or three ministers, 
at the house and at the grave-side, and that in those successive 
prayers, all those especially bereaved are photographed in outline 
and commended to God three times over; to be sure unity is 
secured, but it is the wearisome unity of a monotone, whereas, in 
all Christian services, the only right unity is that which you see in a 
good picture, where there are never-so-many elements, or forms of 
material present ; human figures, hills and valleys, trees, breadths of 
haze, lights, sky-lines and what not ; but all are victoriously reduced 
to the oneness of an absolute composition, by that unifying genius 
which no man can analyze and tell how it does what it does, but in 
which man is the image of the God who made him, as wonderfully 
as at any other point of his mental organism, save only his moral 
attributes and the workings thereof. The organization of a service, 
then, so that while it may be very plural in its details and full of 
variety, it shall be a solid unity, is a work of art, a real composition, 
and it needs some thought and care. Still further, the result to be 
secured is such a choice one and in such a choice field, that it is 
worth some attention. It requires some attention, and some atten- 
tion not only to compose and unify the legitimate elements of variety 


346 YALE LECTURES. 


in God’s worship, but to eliminate all spurious elements, sensation- 
alism, vain-glorious music, eloquent prayers, rituals that are the 
product of one local minister’s brain, unsaturated by the liturgical 
wisdom of the ages; in short, all the spawn of the spurious. 

Fourthly, a word as to variety insermons. How shall sermon- 
izers be various and so not tire their audiences? Shall they go 
outside of Christianity and outside of the Bible for fresh and taking 
topics ; topics that men are immersed in at the moment and are 
therefore likely to give their attention to if their minister takes them 
up—such as the election, the murder, the strike of laborers, the great 
defalcation, the last scientific or other book? No—Christianity is 
fertile enough in topics, if you only find them. If you want to 
allude to the murder and the defalcation and the book, as illustrating 
or as clinching some Christian thing about which you are talking, 
very well; but de not make the body of your discourse of secular 
material and stuff. 

But just as energetically as I say, do not go outside of Chris- 
tianity—in a large interpretation of that word Christianity—do I 
add: be careful, while you are observing those true and obvious 
limits, be careful not to make your Christian sermon itself dull, by 
too exclusive preaching on a small assortment of truths. You have 
heard it said of some men, that they have only about one sermon. 
They preach from a good many texts and on a good many subjects, 
but they always preach the same sermon. All roads lead to Rome ; 
and these preachers in all their themes bring up at their dear Rome 
presently. At a certain Yale commencement, as much as thirty 
years ago, the annual concio ad clerum was preached by the Rev. 
George Perkins, and his subject had been given him a year before- 
hand by the General Association of Connecticut, and it was Chris- 
tian Sanctification, Perkins was a strong man and an excellent and 
successful parish minister, and a redoubtable, much-speaking anti- 
slavery man. We all knew what he would most want to discuss in 
that concio of his, but, said we, “he is tied up for once; Christian 
Sanctification is his subject, unanimously voted to him and there he 
is.’ Perkins was as able to discuss Sanctification as the next man, 
he was considerably sanctified himself; but when we flocked into 
yonder Church on The Green, to hear him, he gave us for his first 
sentence, these words :—‘‘ The greatest hindrance to sanctification 
in this country, is Slavery ;” and from that he went on to give us 

of his plain-spoken, rousing and good anti-slavery speeches. I 


YALE LECTURES. 347 


am not here to say whether he did right or wrong, but I want to 
caution you against habitually having one discourse, whatever your 
subject may be, or at most but half a dozen discourses ; better have 
more. We all know that Christianity has her major truths and her 
minor truths ; and that majors may go into sermons oftener than 
minors ; and that some majors are so immensely major (the majors 
of the majors), that tones from them—tones direct or tones far-away 
and faint—may reasonably be heard in a good part of our public 
utterances ; but to say, as some men have been known to, that we 
will never preach a sermon from which a man listening might not 
learn the way of salvation and be saved then and there, if he never 
heard a sermon before, is to limit one’s self and cut off one’s variety . 
and provide for our being tiresome over much. 

Also, why should every sermon that we preach be constructed 
in one and the same way, as so many heads and two applications, 
one to saints and one to sinners ; why not make lots of sermons with 
no heads and no applications, like a poem? The highest kind of 
poem never has heads, much less thrusts them forth and calls the 
world to make a note of them. It has a skeleton and points of 
juncture and articulation in the skeleton, but all that is concealed, not 
in any guile, or even with intention, any more than a born infant is 
deliberately planned and plotted to conceal that frame work which he 
undoubtedly has. A born sermon never advertises its joints, first, 
second, third and fourth and so on; though a very important class 
of sermons reasonably may and often do and even perhaps must ; 
I refer to such as are formulated by the formulative intellect, being 
manufactured rather than born and designed to instruct rather 
than magnetize. 

Again, why should a preacher be habitually didactic, or habit- 
ually expository, or habitually hortatory, or habitually argumentative, 
or habitually pathetic and think he has failed if somewhere in his 
discourse he has not visibly wept, or let a tremulo into his voice. 
There is enough to weep about, more than enough, and a preacher 
had better let himself do it sometime before he dies, and perhaps 

several times, but why found his reputation on that and be monoto- 
nous about it. There is nothing more tedious than tears, if they 
are let on too frequently. ‘This is a poor community to cry in,” 
said one of my deacons one day, when we were querying whether 
to call in a certain emotional evangelist. “This is a very poor 
community to cry in.” 

25 


348 : YALE LECTURES. 


And it is a poor community to do any one thing in monoto- 
nously. All sorts of sermons are open to us to preach. And let us 
preach them. Sometimes we may take the modern newspaper 
article for our model and be short, direct and business-like, letting 
exordiums and perorations, heads and applications, appeal and 
hortations and all that kind of valuable machinery go. Sometimes, 
however, we may put all the machinery in ; and speak an hour per- 
haps in order to get it in. Sometimes we may wrestle on a subject 
till we exhaust it, but more often we had better take a lesser task 
and treat just an interesting corner only of the subject, getting 
through in twenty minutes, if we have good luck. Why be monot- 
onous, I say again. Why have certain doctrines that you dearly 
love and build up your experience on ; and then feel like a fish out - 
of water, if you are not speaking on those. You are a Calvinist, I 
will suppose. As likely as not you are an Arminian, (Arminians are 
pretty thick, the Methodists being responsible for making a swarm 
of them) ; but I will suppose that you are a Calvinist. So you will 
preach Calvinism. All right, do it; but the items of agreement 
between you and Arminius are more than your items of disagree- 
ment; therefore, why not multifold your preaching and ease your 
hearers, by going over among those items frequently? Not merely 
would you thus give comfort as not seeming to them monotonous, 
and amaze your congregation by your versatility as a man of mind, 
but when you got back from your excursion among those, neutral 
items and began to enforce your Calvinism once again on the peo- 
ple, you would find that you were impressing them decidedly more 
than would have been possible, had you stood by your Calvinistic 
specialties straight along and fed them out to your sheep, unmiti- 
gated and undiversified by perhaps less condensed food. We have 
learned in physiology, that our nutriment should not be in the 
quintessence form always, but should be ameliorated by admixtures 
of lesser value and even by a certain ratio of what might be called 
trash material, that is, that cannot be assimilated but must go for 
waste ; and yet meanwhile may serve some mechanical, or other use 
in the processes of our systems. 

Before I leave this subject of diverse sermonizing, among the 
rules for securing it, such as various reading and all kinds of contact 
with human life as it is and with Nature and with Art, I would like 
to mention prominently and in fact put before everything else, the 
rule that you must have contact at all points, contact at all points 


YALE LECTURES. 349 


rather than a few, with that world of multifarious material massed in 
the Bible. At first, it would seem as though all ministers inevitably 
would have this contact with the entire contents of the Book; but 
it is not so. The undeniable presence in the world of monotonous 
preaching proves that. Men could not be monotonous if they had 
possessed themselves of the universality of this volume, that is if 
they had drawn their topics from all parts of it, enforcing upon 
themselves some sort of system in the matter, instead of going into 
the book hap-hazard when they wanted a sermon, after the fashion 
of the grab-bag. Grab-bag selection exposes us to the peril of 
preaching our whole life through, without using at all some of the 
material that the Bible has waiting for us. That is why I took it 
upon me last year when I was here, to speak some kind words about 
that round-and-round of contemplations, prayers, services and ser- 
mons established and made sure by the Christian Year, that device 
of the liturgical communions of the world. I said then, and I say 
now, that I do not hold that up as a divinely ordained curriculum 
at all; I do not even say it is the best one; but I insist that some 
cycle or system is necessary, if ministers are going to be made 
certain to preach on all proper and good pulpit themes, and preach 
on them with a duly distributed emphasis on each theme. Leta 
preacher provide his own curriculum, if he does not entirely relish 
one drawn out by the church at large. Iam sure however, if some- 
how he could be induced to let the godly wisdom of somebody 
besides himself be called in, it would plainly appear in the result, 
that the godly wisdom of ages on ages, and millions on millions of 
men—hosts of whom were exceedingly well-furnished men—adds 
up larger, as a rule, than one man’s single, solitary and lonesome 
wisdom. But no matter about that, if only he will start out to have 
his weekly choice of pulpit subjects regulated in the main by a 
deliberately chosen and previously-established order, even if it 
must be that nobody but himself deliberately choose and establish 
it, let him move by a doctrinal order if that suits; engaging with 
himself to make the circuit of all Christian doctrine in the course 
of twelve months or two years say, using his Sunday mornings for it, 
and leaving his second sermon, each Sunday, to be given up to 
more miscellaneous and disorderly discoursings. Let him take his 
liberty, I repeat, as to the particular order he will obey ; taking care 
simply that his pet order be formulated on a Biblical basis and 
therefore includes all preachable things; each preachable thing 


350 : YALE LECTURES. 


being magnified by him, or only moderately magnified, according 
as it is moderately magnified or not in Holy Writ itself. 

You understand, brethren, I am harping as I do on a system- 
atized flow of subjects, with only one thought in my mind, although 
movement by system has numbers of advantages—only one thought, 
namely: that if you go by some preconsidered and thoughtfully 
ptepared cycle, in your preaching, you are likely to be a man of 
variety and so far fascinating and not dull. Your cycle, of course, 
whatever form it takes, must rest on the Bible as a whole and not 
on the Bible in spots; therefore your multiformity as a preacher 
will correspond to the almost illimitable multiformity of the Bible 
itself. So much as to sermons. 

Fifthly, let us look at prayers. And there I touch more diff- 
cult ground. You cannot limber your voice much in prayers and 
secure variety in that way, and you certainly cannot make many 
gestures ; and it is preordained in the nature of things, that prayer 
shall have certain fixed features, such as confession, supplication, 
intercession and thanksgiving; and besides, if you undertake to 
make yourself too interesting in prayer, by an ever-changing way 
of treating confession, supplication, intercession and thanksgiving, 
you are kept on such a keen intellectual and rhetorical jump that 
neither you nor your congregation can really pray. As intellectu- 
alists and rhetoricians you may have a very fine time indeed and be 
something worth going to, but as petitioners before God, you are a 
failure and a public nuisance. So then, as regards prayer many are 
led to say: Let the prayers of thé Church be written out and 
prescribed ; let us have just that uniformity and run the risk of the 
tedium of repetitioners—so much risk as there actually is; which 
is not much. But others, while they admit the comparatively nar- 
row range for versatility in prayer to which we are confined, proceed 
to add: But within that range, we can legitimately do some things 
to escape the drone of sameness ; for instance, we need not make 
a distinct effort to get into the same phraseologies every Sunday ; 
we may avail ourselves of so much diversity of diction as is natural 
to us; and again, we may be pastorly in our hearts, so that when we 
are presenting to God the case of our people, we slip easily and 
sweetly in to a good deal of minuteness and have the advantage of 
the endless variety of minuteness ; moreover, if the minister is as 
religious as he ought to be and when he prays, moves in on God 
by the Holy Ghost and not by his own impulse, he will always 


YALE LECTURES. 351 


seem fresh, diversified and satisfactory, whether he touches custom- 
ary points or uncustomary, and whether his vocabulary is new every 
Sunday or no; and one of the great advantages of extemporized 
prayer (they add), comes in there ; prayer in its ideal, as carrying 
us into the presence of the Most High God and enforcing upon us 
therefore, particularly, a high-type utterance, is such a total impos- 
sibility for mortal man, that perforce he is thrown upon the aid of 
the Holy Ghost, and once brought to that, it is not possible, as was 
said, that he should be monotonous and uninteresting. There may 
be a good. share of sameness in him from Sunday to Sunday, his 
bump of language may be small and his natural bump for ideas 
may be small, but an inspired man’s small bump is better than the 
powerful bump of a man uninspired just as Mr. Moody’s ignorance, 
which he once said he had consecrated to God, is more of a force 
for all the practical purposes of the Kingdom of God, than tons of 
unconsecrated learning. 

Thus runs the talk, pro and con. And in the midst of it we 
must accept the denominational position and pulpit and liturgical 
usage wherein God seems to place us, and do the best we can. My 
own experience of public prayer is hardly worth referring to, except 
perhaps as a warning; but with my tendency to amplification, not 
to say inflation, and considering, on the other hand, the insatiable 
desire for brevity which distinguishes the modern congregation, I 
have concluded at last to be satisfied if I can get into each prayer 
some of the essential objective and other elements of prayer. In 
respect of the proper spirit in prayer, we assuredly should not be 
satisfied unless that is in always and every time; but as respects 
everything else, we should not be too hard upon ourselves. I know 
it is a fallacy to say that the Publican’s prayer—‘ Lord be merciful 
to me a sinner ;” and the prayer of the crucified malefactor, “Lord 
remember me when thou comest into thy kingdom ;” and the prayer 
of Peter sinking in the waters of Galilee, ‘“‘Lord save me’’—I know 
it is a fallacy to mention these and like instances, as legitimating 
the omission from public prayer of the larger part of the elements 
of prayer full and complete ; but it is a comfort to think of these 
instances, nevertheless. The thief on the cross had not time to go 
through the entire service of the Book of Common Prayer and 
close with a recessional hymn ; neither had Peter. They were both 
in an emergency. But not much more of an emergency than a 
modern, extempore minister is in, leading the prayers of a congre- 


352 YALE LECTURES. 


gation with the remorseless church clock ticking in front of him and 
the modern man in the pew, with watch in hand timing his progress. 
The moral pressure on him to get through is strong, knowing as he 
does that if moral pressure fails on him and he keeps on being 
lengthy from year to year, by and by physical pressure will take 
the field and carry him off out of that parish. I feel then, for 
myself, that all I can engage to do, as regards completeness of 
prayer made interesting and profitable by due versatility, is to do 
the best I can. And angels could do no more. I will aim at a 
prayerful spirit. I will aim to be tolerably brief. And as to things 
further, I will take my chance; using what intellect, taste, power 
of expression, pastorly thoughtfulness, Biblical scope and so on, 
I happen to have at the moment and throwing myself on the chari- 
table consideration of the assembly, be it more or be it less. It is 
one of the stock remarks of the liturgists though, that all such 
well-meaning clergymen, however inspired, do at last have ruts 
in which they move, though not conscious of it always. All I 
can say is, I hope this is a slander. Some of the extemporizing 
ministers reply that they know it is. And there I leave the case. 
Sixthly, how shall we escape sameness in the administration of 
ordinances and in the management of ceremonial occasions that are 
not ordinances? I think I notice a growing disposition all around 
not to escape sameness in these matters, but to let it in and love it 
and deal it out to the people and make them likewise love it. 
Most of the young and old couples now-a-days, in the regions where 
I live at any rate, when they come to the solemnities of wedlock, 
desire to be married in the use of some determinate office or ritual 
that a good many other, couples have used safely and successfully. 
. Whether it is that they distrust the faculties of the clergy, or that 
formalism is on the increase, or that a wedding has come to be 
thought more of an occasion than it used to be, or that in the 
alarming increase of divorce there is a corresponding instinctive 
desire to forestall divorce by the introduction of more nuptial pomp, 
impression and nail-fast ceremony, I know not; but the drift is all 
one way. And I liketo humor it. [like it for the parties concerned 
and I like it for myself. It comforts my ceremonial consciousness, 
(whatever that may mean), to do just as those couples say. So 
far as variety is concerned, every wedding is such a fresh thing, 
in its own self and essentially, that no repetitiousness of ritual can 
tame it down, I find. A Sunday’s service may be humdrum by the 


YALE LECTURES. 353 


operation of various causes; but a wedding never. Every bride is 
a new instance of beauty and sweet expectancy ; every bridegroom 
is more captivating than he ever was before. Every wedding march 
that the sympathetic organ careers through seems as good as new; 
and then there are the flowers and the people and the girl’s father 
and mother, with their hearts full of crying and laughing both ; 
while all other hearts all around-about are sympathetically in much 
the same predicament ; and now if, when the rejoicing organ stops 
and the people hush down, the minister lifts up his voice and speaks 
forth an order of words wherein you can hear a sound of all genera- 
tions and can feel the touch of innumerable like gracious occasions, 
do you suppose that it necessarily quenches that wedding? I never 
found it so. It lies inthe very nature of ceremony to be repetitious ; 
to follow well-known, oft-repeated lines of action and utterance. It 
is not possible to get any ceremoniousness at all in, on the principle 
of helter-skelter. Some extreme persons, in order to forestall 
formalism and vain-gloriousness, would just deify helter-skelter and 
have that for the one embellishment of what are called occasions ; 
for instance, making all weddings different from all others; and 
administering even the Sacraments of the Church in at least so 
much free-and-easiness that the congregation cannot tell quite what 
is coming. 

Well, speaking of ordinances, it is inevitable that there should 
be a large constant or unchangeable element in them all. That, at 
any rate. - To begin low down and take a perfectly safe position, I 
should say that in every infant baptism there must be an infant. 
There is no chance for variety and originality and helter-skelter 
there. And there must be some responsible person, or persons, to 
present the infant. And there must be water, more or less. And 
a certain uniform, unchangeable act must be performed ; in which 
act certain ideas are involved always—which essential ideas it is 
customary to express. Baptism is not an ever-fluctuating mere. 
show, but back of all the conventional or ritual drapery of it, there 
lies an unchangeable core of reality ; a great core it is too, else bap- 
tism could not keep up century after century. 

And similarly, in the Lord’s Supper there are essential things 
which can never be changed, because they are essential. Helter- 
skelter must keep away. 

But these essentials of an ordinance being secured, God leaves 
us to our freedom, only stipulating that in all our ceremonial 


354 | YALE LECTURES. 


amplifications we keep in the line of the core-realities of the ordi- 
nance and simply give those core-realities a more voluminous 
expression, just as he insists that a seed, if it would not remain a 
seed (as most likely it would not), shall unfold itself in infallible 
conformity to the vital idea or type that is in it. 

And now since I have spoken deprecatingly of picking out pul- 
pit subjects from the Bible without any method, like children blindly 
fingering in a grab-bag, I desire to be consistent and advise you; 
First and most certainly, not to extemporize on the spot your ritual 
additions to the core of God’s ordinances, so that nobody can begin 
to tell what is impending ; and secondly, if you do not think it best 
to subject yourself verbatim to any ritual thus far devised by men 
or churches not to manufacture your ritual in any grand desire for 
originality or popular variety, but far otherwise with a reverent and 
cultured desire to assimilate your ceremonial to those great outline 
features of ceremonial, which characterize alike every liturgy ever 
published by any branch of the church universal. 

You observe, my brethren, that I am falling back again on my 
feeling that any ceremonial occasion, because it is just that, a ceremo- 
nial occasion and not something else, is entitled to a good measure of 
stability of procedure and must have it if it is not to sink from a cere- 
mony, or even a church ordinance, into I do not know what,—into a 
thing of poor effect on all beholders and participants, at all events. 

Finally, the only remaining forms of possible and decent variety 
in church sevices, that I need to mention, are, a wide selection of 
Scriptural lessons ; a similar wide selection of hymns to be sung ; and 
a reasonable use of what may be called special services; praise 
meetings—anniversaries—services of benevolence or reform—com- 
memorative meetings and others. 

Some ministers are extremely conservative in regard to these 
last. You cannot get into their church buildings with your mass 
meetings in furtherance of this and that. They uphold the regular, 
orderly worship of the church, they say. Our Protestant Episcopal 
brethren are rather careful on that point. Others are ready to let 
in almost anything that promises any good to man—to his body or 
his soul—or to any of his interests. Secular lectures may come in ; 
and political assemblies may come in, if only they have some show 
of moral intentions ; and town fairs, educational conventions, con- 
ventions to get women their rights—yes, the innumerable ferment 
of this practical, man-loving ninteenth century may come in. 


YALE LECTURES. 355 


I think that when these things come along naturally—the best 
of them—they may be accepted as a good thing enough in the 
sanctuary, especially if the place where we live has no public-hall ; 
but I would not artificially get up occasions for the one purpose of 
variety, that people may get their religion in unusual and perhaps 
partially disguised forms. I do not argue the matter, but leave it 
there. 

_ The selection of Scriptures and hymns is more important to be 
attended to; but I have already laid down the principles that should 
govern that. Half the time, when I exchange pulpits with a brother 
minister, I find when I get home that he has given out to my people 
some hymn that I never did. I look that hymn over and get some 
one to play or sing to me the tune to which it is set in our church 
book and I find probably that it is as good as many hymns which I 
have given out. Thereupon I reflect afresh on my own limitations 
and wonder why I am not more all-ranging than Iam. I tell you, 
brethren, we all need watching lest we grow narrow and set and 
therefore stupid, in our preferences and tastes. A private-man may 
grow stupid if he wants to, but a minister must not, because if he 
does, this stupidity of his is the measure and limit of the opportu- 
nities of a whole congregation. ‘They have to sing his narrowly- 
selected few hymns. And they have to hear, mark, learn and 
inwardly digest his ever-recurring little round of Scriptural read- 
ings ; the copious, round-about, all-sided, mighty Word and Book 
of God, being scrimped to the dimensions of his individuality and 
not suffered to speak with more than half its voices. I consider an 
established lectionary as an almost necessary thing in all churches. 
Let alone in this presence—this strong congregational presence— 
the question who shall establish the lectionary ; there ought to be 
one. The Congregational Conference in this State of Connecticut 
ought to issue one for our state ministers to look at.. They need 
not worship it—that would be uncongregational—but they could 
look at it and offer themselves to be enticed by it; and the beauty 
of it is, they could use it and their peoples know it not. Perhaps 
the greatest difficulty in the way of such a movement is, that.so- 
many of our ministers are under the impression that the sermon 
they have in the pulpit with them, must determine the lesson that 
shall be read that day. Unity of impression requires that, they 
fancy ; whereas it would be an aid to impression if they did not 
make the lessons, the hymns and all the prayers, revolve around 


356 | YALE LECTURES. 


that one manuscript, even as it would have been an aid to every 
interest involved if that minister who made everything revolve 
around the communion service, as I explained to you, had diversified 
the occasion more. 

But why do not we all use the well-considered and wide-sweep- 
ing lectionary of the Protestant Episcopal Church? Because that 
scheme of Lessons is grounded on the Christian Year—an invention 
which we all respect as a well-intentioned effort to provide an ample 
and thoroughly Christian cultus, but which for historical and other 
reasons many of us have not adopted and perhaps never shall. So 
then, we had better begin to make a lesson-order of our own and 
see how we come out. If we come out as well as the Episcopalians 
have and furnish for ourselves a round of readings, wherein all parts 
of the Bible are honored, we need not be ashamed; whatever prin- 
ciple of selection we adopt. But I want something. I want it for 
myself. I want to see my Brethren in it. I want to have you 
young ministers put through that orderly march and to see you 
absorb the insensible culture of it and become Catholic in your 
taste and Biblical, rather than denominational in your theology, fat 
with the fatness of many foods rather than lean and grim through 
feeding on this or that special food. 

For the man who has established his lectionary, by the logic of 
the case has therein established the course of his sermonizing also ; 
or what is the same thing, the course of his thinking; the shape 
therefore of his entire religious development. | 


I leave these freely-spoken thoughts with you, dear brethren, to © 


sift, expurgate, chew upon and charge against me, if need be. 


—— , " — P = 
ge ee ee ee ee ee a 





ROUTINE: ITS PERILS AND ITS 
VALUES. 


At first I looked for a better word than routine to describe 
what I am after; for so many people and ministers have come 
under the supreme influence of the Perils of Routine, that the term 
itself has a meanish kind of savor, and it makes one draw a tired, 
long breath, just to hear the sound of it. But I found it was the 
best I could do, all things considered, and so I move out and forth 
under the burden of it. However, in its use I shall refer simply to 
a fixed round-and-round. It does not hurt the planets to go round 
and round, neither does it hurt the Maker of the planets to have 
them do it ; and it seems to be proven, therefore, at the very begin- 
ning, that routine is not necessarily bad. It is bad or not, just 
according to the creature that is in the round-and-round. The 
right kind of a man or minister finds it beautiful, is as happy in it 
as the stars in their courses, and as much helped along. 

I wish, friends, you would consider this gigantic, multiplex, 
eternal, circularity over our heads here in the sky, and all about, 
and let it prepossess you a little in favor of Routine. It is a curious 
and fascinating circumstance that God has builded his universe to 
go in ever-repeated circles so much. On the face of it, it looks as 
though the curve had something in it essentially delightful to his 
mind ; and that the countless whirl of things along their curved. 
paths in such a wide immensity and in such perilous-looking, hair- 
breadth ins-and-outs among themselves, were a most satisfactory 
spectacie to his eyes, he being able, such is his boundless faculty, to 
contemplate it in its magnificent entirety at a glance, rather than 
pick it up in laborious piecemeal as our wretched little faculties do. 


358 | YALE LECTURES. 


I know it would fairly intoxicate a man to look down on some good- 
sized handiwork of his own like that and watch the interplay of the 
thing, the junctures made by the many movements, and get the 
perfect harmony and co-ordination all through: all set in cycles 
also, and the eternal grace of cycles. I never heard that there was 
any mechanical difficulty in setting up a universe on the rectangular 
principle mainly, with its endless jerks on the feeling of all behold- 
ers. Neither can I imagine that there would have been any mechani- 
cal difficulty or any inability whatever, as respects the measure of 
God’s power, in fashioning and running a creation wherein the fact 
of a thing’s having occurred once—as the rising of the sun, or the 
flood of the tide—would be sure proof that that same thing would 
never occur again to all eternity. The inconvenience of such a 
creation as that in the matter of laying our practical plans, and the 
sense of insecurity and apprehension which it would shed abroad 
in men’s minds, would be something, evidently } for example if I 
agreed to lecture here at three o’clock, and on arriving here found 
that the sun had not yet risen, and so far as heard from might not 
rise for a week, or perhaps a year, or possibly never, having gone 
off to the outposts of God’s realm as though on some mysterious 
lark—the inconvenience and anxiety, I say, of such an infinite 
organization of desultoriness as that would have been painful ; but 
such an organization would have been practicable, I take it, to a 
being of infinite power. It would have only been universalizing 
what is supposed to occur in the case of a miracle; that unforsee- 
able irruption among the fine old and much beloved uniformities of 
Nature. But our God is no such a person as that. It is constitu- 
tional with him to be a routinist considerably, and he has so made 
us that it is both a pleasure and a necessity to be routinists too. 

And this natural predisposition to circularity in the Maker of 
all things, after it had embodied itself in great Nature and in the 
structure of man, was sure to manifest itself in other fields of God’s 
activity. ‘Therefore, in the only recorded instance where he has 
definitely and minutely expressed his mind in regard to human 
public worship of him ; he has assimilated the worship to the cycles 
of the firmament—that first, as was naturally to be expected—then 
next as could not so easily have been anticipated, he started rota- 
tions of sevens ; seven days, seven years, seven times seven years ; 
a whole miscellany of sevens round-and-round, thus giving an arti- 
ficial sanctity to the number seven forever. The number three also 


YALE LECTURES. 359 


got in. And in every substantial respect, that old Jewish cultus 
was methodical and repetitious to the last degree. When the priest 
in the temple had done a thing, or a definite set and circuit of 
things, he had to go over it all again, verbatim, and the priests 
themselves had their turns and relays of service in a fixed math- 
ematical order of hours and days. ‘These orders, cycles, mystical 
sevens and all the rest; these holy and sweet routines, could be 
converted into the numbness and tiresomeness of routine in an evil 
sense ; and the Prophet Isaiah in his first chapter has opened him- 
self out on that with a wholesome rage; nevertheless, the God of 
the orderly firmament took the responsibility of being orderly also 
(orderly and repetitious) in the worship which he appointed, and if 
men turn his good thing into an offence, on them be the curse. 

I want to speak for a moment rather analytically on the special 
risks of any round-and-round. 

We are so made—and I am glad we are—that habitual action 
—action in a much repeated circuit of action—tends to become 
automatic ; and the bad feature of automatic action (on its religious 
side) is that it tends to be unreflective, inattentive, mechanical, 
formalistic, and does not sense what it is about. For example—an 
automatic man—a man who has prayed to God innumerable times 
and got dreadfully used to it so that he has only to start his prayer 
and the prayer runs on, hums and drones of itself—that man does 
not feel whose presence he is in, and whom he is speaking to, An 
automatic, minister converses with people about their souls, and 
pretty much forgets all the while, the serious and tender realities 
he ishandling. An automatic ritualist travels through the sufficiently 
excellent book of worship in his hand on any given Sunday, with 
so little conscious impression on his dulled feeling as he passes 
along that he comes to the end with only a hazy self-satisfaction as 
having wound his way through an appointed opus operatum spell, 
a deft sort of contrivance for blessing souls without their knowing 
it; that as distinguished from a recollected, volitional, attent and 
consciously receptive march from step to step of the service. And 
the greatest suggestion that we non-liturgical people make against 
printed rituals, is that they produce human automata too much ; the 
very persons that Isaiah in his first chapter made his terrible stroke 
at. That is what we say, but of course the automata referred to 
are wide-awake enough yet to strike back. 

An automatic theologian is a man who has a definite, limited 


360 YALE LECTURES. 


set of first-class doctrines, perhaps the sacred seven, perhaps the 


partially sacred three or five, on which he has run his mind around ~ | 


at the same gait three hundred thousand times; until now if he 
be started—whether by himself, by the nudge of an antagonist, or 
by a sudden wind, he goes the same track without the ghost of a 
volition in his own mind to help him along, but simply as an expert 
plays a piano; with no voluntary touch of this, that and the other 
key, as is proven by the fact that at the same time he is playing, 
this expert can carry on a conversation, or read a book, or absorb 
himself in a game of chess. It is easy to see where his mind is. 
It is on those other things. Therefore it is not on his playing. 
That playing is done by his unconscious self; that artificial and 
second self which has been created by diligent routine. Well, this 
theologian referred to, this finely developed machine, as he does 
not run by conscious intelligence, so he is not accessible to the 
attacks of intelligence from the outside. You cannot upset his 
theology. Neither can you modify it. Neither can you cause it to 
expand from its own core, and be itself, yet bigger. That would 
be contrary to the genius of iteration and automatism. Automatism 
in man is parallel to instinct in animals. The animals are born 
with their instincts, while men get up their automatism by force of 
routine. But, once gotten up, it is instinct over again pretty much. 
The little duck just out of his shell runs to the water infallibly. If 
he were omniscient, he could not do it more surely. But that 
duck is’ not omniscient. He is not even reasonable. Therefore 


you cannot reason with him. He would remain a duck, even if | 


Jonathan Edwards took himin hand. Well, he ought to. But that 
is not the reason that he does. No, he has no reason. I do 
not complain of him. I only protest against his being called 
intelligent. 4 

Now, wherein does the theological automaton differ from the 
duck? In some particulars no doubt. First of all, he was not 
born so. God forbid. He originally selected his theology in the 
exercise of more or less mind. Perhaps he reasoned on it a good 
deal. Perhaps he took it by inheritance. Perhaps he was not 
capable of real reasoning, but was capable of fumbling or trying to 
reason and his theology is a resultant of his fumblings, taken in the 
aggregate. But, whether in one way or another, he did secure his 


theology, and then he began to convert himself into our automaton. — 


He ran his theological scheme through his mind over and over year 








YALE LECTURES. 361 


after year, with such sameness of argument, meditation and what 
not, and with such inattention to all distracting side-lights and new 
lights, that at last his whole nature (thus mysteriously are we made) 
began to keep step to the tune of it, and now that nature of his is 
like that cork leg, so famous in song ; it runs itself. Say, Predesti- 
nation, and off it goes. Say, Free-Will; Say, Irresistible Grace ; 
say a dozen different things that I might mention, and it acts like a 
hist-a-boy to that automaton. It winds him up and he buzzes till he 
runs down. Or considering him as a duck, he blindly starts for the 
water. What was not instinct in him at first, but a show of reason, 
is pure instinct now. I do not say he should not take to water, or 
to speak literally, that he ought not to hold to his theology; but I 
say he should not hold it automatically. He did not start it so. 
He started his theology like a flexible human being. He thought— 
more or less, as I have said before—he paused, he inquired, he 
asked his neighbors perhaps, he prayed about the matter, and a 
thing that started in that way, why should it not be kept up in that 
way? If the way was good enough to begin with, it is good enough 
to keep on with. He is older now than he was at first, and he has 
more neighbors to ask, and more light has had time to break forth 
out of God’s holy word ; the Book has even been revised since he 
began to be an automaton ; and he is losing all this, and how can 
theology ever make any advance either in him or in the world, if 
things are to be carried on in his fashion? 

Moreover, if he ever undertakes to preach, the people will not 
be stimulated by him. They know a machine when they hear the 
creak of it. They know that the speaking automaton up there 
does not himself intensely taste the ideas that he is promulging. 
They know, too, that those words of his are not the live product of 
his mind on the spot, as fresh to him and as delightfully flavored to 
his perceiving taste, as though no one had ever thought of them 
before ; much less used them. For an automatic thinker is likely 
to be an automatic rhetorician. He uses the words that conven- 
tionalism dictates ; he has heard them all his life, and spoken them 
all his life, and worn all their original bloom off and totally lost their — 
sap and the thrill of their root-meanings, and he handles them and 
tosses them off as so many dead things; they are dead to himself ; 
and dead to his hearers because dead to him. I cannot explain it, 
but so it is, a man who does not reach the tongue of his mind down 
the whole length of the deep significance, physical, historical and 


362 YALE LECTURES. 


associational, of every term ‘he uses in his public utterance, as the 
humming bird probes the heart of the flower with a quiver of de- 
light, cannot pass those words of his over into listening minds in a 
way to start them into any particular quiver. 

In expounding to you, as I now have, the insensibility and 
unconsciousness of mental movements automatically carried on, to 
which automatism routine undoubtedly tends, I have said the prin- 
cipal thing that can be said against routine. Still, I would like to 
add a word more in the same line. If a minister confines himself 
to the duties of his profession entirely, to sermonizing and _ pastor- 
izing in their never-ceasing circuit, under the impression perhaps 
that it is his duty to do so, or possibly because by long separation 
from other things he has lost all relish for other things; it will 
surely hum-drum him by and by, lessen his vigor, lessen his zest, 
lessen the e/an of his attacks; and lessen public interest in him. 
The subjects we treat are large and many sided, the human interests 
we manipulate are the supreme interests of life, and have in them 
great pathos and great fascination ; nevertheless we must range be- 
yond our parish and our preaching a good deal, if we are not going 
to lose our spring. We must read something beside theology. 
Poetry will be good for us. Fiction will be good for us in well- 
chosen doses. We should hear music. We should look into books 
of science. We should luxuriate in pictures. We should visit Wall 
street. We should go down to the sea in ships. We should have 
a very diversified circle of acquaintances ; and be sure not to have 
them all alike. Some of them may be saints, but they need not all 
be. Some of them may be sombre, but some of them should be 
humorous, and occasionally one may even be of the twittering sort. 
Birds twitter, and bird-like natures always may. As I came along to 
this point in my lecture, I paused and began to run over in my 
mind the names, faces, manners, dress, character and history of 
those whom I know, crony with, and depend on; and I declare to 
you it was almost as good asa three day’s outing to drop on to 
each one in that way, and fondly analyze them all. Human beings 
are exceedingly interesting. And they are put up in such different 
shapes! Under the general sameness, of course, that belongs to 
human nature, you find on a genial inspection and shape of each 
such an infinite miscellany of attributes, traits, idiosyncrasies, in- 
firmities and pleasant forms of perverseness, as are partly comi- 
cal, partly touching, partly amazing, partly admirable and partly 


ee 


YALE LECTURES. 363 


frightful besides. At any rate it is good to goamong them. There 
are two kinds of recreation. One is to go to sleep, or what is the 
same thing, fold your hands, half-close your eyes, sit around and be 
stupid and let your nature carry on her insensible and unsearchable 
recuperations in you. The other way of recreation is to keep 
awake and keep pretty bright and simply move your mind around 
on things that you are not used to, things outside of your profession ; 
public entertainments, excursions, “hunting, fishing and war,” as 
we used to read in the old geographies. And especially upon the 
face of Nature do you move around—move slowly ; loaf; Nature 
takes loafers into her arms and loves them, prefers them and tells 
them things and soaks her own peace into them and smooths out 
their seemingly hopeless kinks and hushes their nerves and elimi- 
nates from their make-up their artificialities and twists of dishonesty 
that they get in society and sends them back home feeling like a 
wood-nymph. That is my experience. ) 

Recreation by diversifying your mental action! ‘That is the 
idea. One night last week when I was writing this lecture, it sud- 
denly staled on me. But I went off that evening to the regular 
meeting of the Liturgical Club, to which I belong ; a club made up 
of three kinds of clerical men; Episcopalians, Catholic Apostolic 
ministers and a more feeble number of Congregationalists ; and I 
watched the play of their strongly contrary individualities for some 
two hours, and played my own individuality too a little, and went 
home as-good as new—and the next morning this tedious lecture 
fairly blossomed again. 

That is the way it works. Do not wear yourself out in routines 
of labor. 

And I may add—do not become so entirely a routinist in your 
work, especially in your intellectual work, that if it so happens 
some time that you are called on to do work outside of your dear 
routine, it will nearly incapacitate you. Some ministers cannot 
much more than half think, except as they are in their own library 
and at their own desk. And some ministers can not preach with 
any freedom and power in a strange pulpit or on an open platform 
or at a street corner. It has been true of some lawyers that they 
could not make an argument, if they could not have something to 
twirl in their fingers while speaking. A great many public speakers, 
(preachers generally they are,) have a regular motion of their body 


which has come to be necessary to the facile action of their intellects 
26 


364 YALE LECTURES. 


—they rest on one foot and then on the other—or they turn their 
heads so and then so and then so again, or they oscillate in a balance, 
now on their heels and now on their toes, or they keep their hands 
traveling monotonously, or they make some particular and perhaps 
eccentric gesture with one hand, while if that hand were tied behind 
their back it would end all further possibility of intelligent utterance. 
It is not well to be a slave to routine. 

I call your attention now to the second general head of my 
discourse, namely: The value of routine. I put value last and 
give it the advantage of a last mention, because I want to make 
my greatest impression with that, for, be the perils of routine what 
they may, I think you had better have them for the sake of the 
values mentioned. Well then listen while I recount those values. 

First, in the matter of your church services—and perhaps in 
some of your other official services—it is a comfort to your people 
to have you a calculable man, not like that suppositious sun which I 
mentioned as not having risen yet when I reached here at three 
o’clock to lecture ; nor even like a comet, which is sure to come 
sometime but nobody so far knows when ; but rather like our actual 
old trustworthy sun, the orb that is always on time, not behind-hand 
and not before-hand and always just about so hot in summer and 
less hot in winter, always keeping his appointments with the other 
orbs, so that they all love him and can pre-arrange their daily and 
yearly affairs on the solid ground of his foreknown fidelities. That 
is the kind of minister to be, if you are to have the hearts of your 
people. They want to know whether you are going to call on them 
in the church to keep Easter in the Spring somewhere, or at Christ- 
mas time—whether at an infant baptism you will have an infant 
present or not—whether the ritual for morning and evening service 
which you have been moving in for some time, is likely to be turned 
end for end some Sunday, or totally supplanted by some new order, 
and whether in these total supplantings, as they promiscuously come 
along, a philosopher could discover any regulative principles of 
before and after in the flow of the details. 

It is a great advantage to your people to have you methodize 
your activities and functions to a certain extent. That first. 

Secondly, it is a great advantage to yourself. Not to mention 
the satisfaction of noticing that your people are contentedly resting 
down on your orderly faithfulness, you can do more work and do 
it easier on system, than you can on spurt, lawlessness and disorder. 


YALE LECTURES. 365 


That is often said ; and it is true. And I am going to tell why. 
There are several wherefores. © 

If you have a method and stand to it every time you make the 
circuit of that method, your mind and body both do more and more 
catch the run of it, get used to it, fashion themselves to it and have 
it for their second nature, their instinct, yes, their automatism. I 
have reviled automatism in certain connections, but now I am going 
to praise it. There certainly are many kinds of work where the 
automatic principle is good enough. There are even many kinds 
that cannot be at all performed except as that principle is brought 
in. Let me illustrate that. The shortest cut between any point in 
the high air and a given point on the ground, is a curve, not a 
straight line but a curve ; and the hawk, when he dives for his prey, 
always travels that curve. He does it by instinct. If he had to do 
it as taught by some professor of mathematics, he would fail. And 
if his mind were as large as Plato’s, instead of being nothing but a 
hawk’s mind, it would not alter anything ; he simply could not keep 
that ideal line. Mere reason is not equal to finding its way practi- 
cally along that curve. The passage must be made automatically. 
It must be in the hawk structurally and congenitally so to do. 

Similarly, if Dr. Carver, when hundreds of glass balls are thrown 
into the air, is going to catch every oneof them on the wing with his 
rifle and break them, or if the pianist is to rush through his complex, 
amazing fingerings with his eyes shut and his thoughts at the ends 
of the earth and with no more consciousness of directing that finger- 
work than though he were dead ; or if Mr. Blondin is to walk on a 
rope in the air across Niagara and wheel a wheel-barrow along the 
rope and for aught I know wheel himself in his wheel-barrow, and 
all in a poise as assured and safe as your poise when you tread a 
side-walk ; then in lack of any instinct for such astonishing doings, 
the men must drill themselves till they get up an instinct; they 
must routine and routine and routine, I do not know how many 
hundreds of times; routine their muscles and their whole bodily 
apparatus ; routine their perceptive faculties ; routine their concen- 
tration ; routine their entire selves in fact, until the greater part by 
far of their performance has passed beyond the lines of voluntary 
action clear out into absolute mechanicalism and they are scarcely 
more than hawks diving instinctively down the air short-cut. 

There are many amazing achievements, like rope-walking, or 
the feats of gymnasts in the arena, or the miracles performed by the 


366 YALE LECTURES. 


sleight-of-hand man, which at first thought we should call physical 
wonders merely, and therefore illustrations simply of the great spon- 
taneity of action to which the body may be brought by long practice ; 
but really there is as much mind as body in these doings, and the 
possibility of mental spontaneity at last is also illustrated by them. 
When somebody walks the rope, he does not do it in the use of the 
same kind of mental faculties that Milton used when he wrote Para- 
dise Lost, or the lawyer uses in a great argument, or the preacher 
in his great discourse, or the high-class mathematician in some 
abstract discovery that he makes; but that man up there on the 
rope uses mind after all and what mind he does use, he uses con- 
summately. It is faculty in absolute drill and scarcely less infallible 
than the hawk’s instinct rushing along his curve. Moreover it is the 
same grade of faculty that the carpenter uses when, with his trained 
eye, he makes instant judgment on such matters as size, form and 
distance ; or that the marksmen uses for similar purposes, or that 
even the painter uses when he arranges spaces, vistas, dimensions, 
heights and the like on his canvas. Moreover, there is a fine exhi- 
bition of disciplined will in the rope-walking, that steady will ; con- 
trolling muscle and nerve and the natural terrors of the mind, was 
not born such a will as that ; it was born like all other wills, pliable, 
timid and fluctuating ; but having been put upon its mettle daily for 
years and years, all those congenital infirmities have been worked 
out of it and there now it is, ruling the difficulties of the occasion 
and facing awful perils without the least conscious effort. 

So then, it is not a bodily autordatism alone that we are called 
to study and admire in these cases of skill and nerve, but a mental 
automatism quite as much; in other words, a manikin on the rope 
in the gymnastic arena, or in the sleight of hand, could not begin to 
do what the man does; and therefore while in these cases we are 
made to know the wonderful perfectibility of the human body by 
dint of routine practice, we are quite as certainly made to know the 
perfectibility of our intellectual parts by the same means and (by 
analogy) of our moral parts. If the several perceptive faculties 
which these physical experts bring into the field when they perform, 
can be made such exceedingly capable faculties, especially if they can 
be brought to operate in such entire unconsciousness of effort at the 
moment—yes more than that, if they can be brought to act absolutely 
well, even if the man turns his attention completely away to other 
matters, then we are prepared to believe that men can be worked 


YALE LECTURES. 367 


along, or routined along—for it is routine that does it—until they 
shall operate in a similar, non-voluntary, unlaborious, automatic man- 
ner, throughout the entire range of their higher attributes ; that is, 
let a man concentrate himself on the discipline of any one of his 
native powers and subject that selected power of his nature to the 
tremendous influence of a duly-protracted round-and-round and 
there is almost nothing that is not possible to be done. Done, for 
instance, for the imagination or for the memory or for the faculty of 
abstraction or forthe conscience. And not only is it possible to push 
any single, selected faculty—as imagination, memory, abstraction or 
conscience—on thus into perfection; but (what is much more 
marvelous), it is possible to harness up a team of faculties and 
diligently routine them together, even as raw soldiers are routined 
together in military drill, until said faculties are able to move in 
absolute co-ordination, in absolute spontaneity together, starting off 
all of them at the least crack of the whip on an automatic dead-run ; 
an unreflective dead-run, an unconscious dead-run, a machine-like 
run, an undirected run, a run of their own motion, a run by blind 
habit, a triumphant run too, such as could never have been approxi- 
mated, save by the calling in of the automatic principle. 

Every thinking man can illustrate this from his own history— 
and IJ can—thus: When I have gathered together a miscellaneous 
heap of memoranda for a sermon, the next step I need to take is 
to organize that miscellany under some terms of order. It will not 
do to tumble it out on my congregation in its present confusion and 
lack of unity, any more than it will do for a painter to empty the 
unassorted contents of his mind on to his canvas. Well, there are 
several possible principles of order whereby I may reduce that heap 
of valuable stuff to shape and make it comprehensible ; some of 
which principles are superficial and scarcely more dignified than a 
trick, while others are philosophical, deep and true. Among these 
perplexing possibles I must choose. I dare not undertake to say 
exactly how many of the faculties of my head are involved in this 
business that I am now describing. A good many; I am sure of 
that. By my perceptives I look at my written memoranda. By my 
memory I recall just what those very abridged and imperfect memo- 
randa stand for. By something-or-other in me I decide the com- 
parative value of those recorded items and the precise place or rank 
to which they therefore shall be assigned in my discourse. Undoubt- 
edly that something or other in me is my religious nature, for one 


368 YALE LECTURES. 


thing. For instance, an item that on inspection seems a little 
irreverent, my reverence rejects. An item not wholly harmonious 
with the revealed truth of God, my reverence and my sanctified 
affection and my truthfulness, reject. Perhaps some one of these 
memoranda is full of fine analysis or full of ideality and I shall take 
hold and deal with it in the use of certain corresponding powers of 
my nature. It begins to look as though all there is of me were 
embarked in this enterprise. JI am not marching into it by any 
single faculty or any six faculties, but I am using my entire team. 
It is a very complex case of cooperation. But I do it easily enough. 
As likely as not I will have that chaos subdued in a few minutes. I 
do not go around among my numerous faculties and exhort each 
one to do his very best now and keep the touch of the elbow with 
his brother faculties and not get into the see-saw of an ugly mule 
team. When I began to make sermons, I did a good deal of this 
exhorting and consumed much time on it. My team had never 
been hitched up before—not much at any rate—certainly they had 
not been hitched to anything so big as a sermon. So I had to 
exhort them and coax and flog. But I accepted myself as I was 
born and proceeded to practice coordination. I exhorted the 
faculties. And Iwhippedthem. Idid it every week. Some weeks 
I thought I had gained on it. Then again, I thought I had not. 
However, on the whole I did gain. And now when I get my chaos 
assembled—my unformulated materials of discourse—all I have to 
do is just what a famous public singer told a friend of mine she 
does when she is on the stage and wants her throat to trill. She 
practiced daily four years, she said, and had not even then succeeded 
in reaching the trill she was after. The physical organs, the organs 
of articulation and her mind, in the several faculties involved, were 
not yet quite co-efficient and simultaneous in their action. They 
could not catch the knack of hitching up together and trilling. But 
at last, suddenly, the lady could not tell how, the long-sought hitch- 
up was-made and off went the trill like a bird. And ever since 
that moment she has had no difficulty. The inharmonious powers 
once harnessed up, never unharnessed. And now whenever she 
wants to perform that feat, she simply gives the word to the facul- 
ties concerned and they take care of it all. She feels and knows 
that they do it and not she. The performance is taken right out of 
her hands. What was volitional for a long time and accompanied 
with a great deal of pushing, is now involuntary; as involuntary 


YALE LECTURES. 369 


as the tick, tick, of a wound-up clock. So the minister with the 
stuff of a sermon on hand, which he is going to organize. For 
years it went hard with him to do that—rather hard—but now the 
hard is easy. He can start his trill with the snap of his finger. 
While he is simply looking at that mass of material, its atoms begin 
to move. And they do not move promiscuously either. Evidently 
they have been seized with a common idea. It is like the drum- 
call in an encampment of soldiers. The soldiers pour out innumer- 
able and fly everywhither, but behold, they fly into companies and 
regiments. ‘Those incoherent, insensate atoms (the minister’s ser- 
mon stuff) do the same thing. They are not insensate. They have 
caught the hint of their master. It isa case of trill. They organ- 
ize themselves. The minister does not do it. At most, he simply 
watches the thing go on and enjoys ‘it. It is just like music, the 
way those atoms and crude masses make haste to get themselves 
into orderliness and there stand in beautiful array. 

I have made too many words on this illustration, but it will 
stand for a large class of mental processes ; processes self-moved, 
processes wherein numbers of our mental powers (to say nothing of 
our corporeal powers), conspire and pull together and do it spon- 
taneously ; processes that are never possible to be arrived at except 
in one way, namely ; by long routine. 

I beg you to take good notice of that last ; that certain mental 
works never can be done at all, if routine is not called in and 
pushed and pushed till what was difficult has become second nature. 
All expert doings depend on just that and that is one of the greatest 
values of routine. I spoke of a long-practiced minister’s looking 
his sermon stuff into shape in a few moments, but that is not the 
only line of work wherein his life-long routining tells. It tells in his 
amplification of that same discourse. It tells in the fairly bewitched 
way in which the entire mixed contents of the creation, like live 
things flock to the out-looks of his mind as he writes, begging to be 
let in for the illumination and enrichment of that discourse. He 
does not have to send out a search warrant for these things. Once 
he did and his search-warrants could not bring in more than a 
fraction of them either. But the warrants have been flying about 
and all abroad for twenty or thirty years now, and the creation has 
taken the hint at last, so that not a single search-warrant is any 
longer necessary. No; but as the heaped-up, unarranged mass of 
sermon-stock that I mentioned as waiting to be organized, suddenly 


370 YALE LECTURES. 


developed a stir in all its atoms, when the master’s order-loving eye 
lighted thereon, so the innumerable things of the creation, so soon 
as they got wind of it that the minister had gone to his desk for 
amplification, took up an automatic movement towards that desk 
and poured in a very embarrassment of riches. 

Or, take the minister as publicly extemporizing, whether in 
prayer or discourse. Once he always rose to utter himself with 
trepidation. He was not sure of his words and he was not sure of 
his ideas. But now he could go on forever. Sometimes he does. 
As likely as not he is eloquent. He does not try to be. He passed 
clear beyond trying years ago and now it isa case of trilling, Or it 
is like those amazing, musically-organized Italians who improvise. 
Those men versify and rhyme and sing and touch the whole thing off 
harmoniously on their guitars, with the facility of rippling brooks, 
because they have for a long time turned their whole peculiar nature 
—body, soul and spirit—into a routine of improvisation. 

Of the same sort precisely, is that unconscious personal poise, 
and unconscious ease of conversation, repartee, fence and sparkle, 
which many a woman of the world displays. Such a man as Daniel 
Webster or John Foster and a thousand more exceedingly able men, 
look upon her as an almost supernatural being ; she is so frightfully 
superior to them in all this beautiful airiness ; whereas the truth is, 
her life has been spent in that thing until she ripples, glitters, tosses 
you on the sharp end of her bodkin and makes you to feel like a 
fool, automatically. She can sparkle as easily as you can prose on 
the weather. , 

In all the fine handicrafts, this same principle comes in abun- 
dantly of course. Proficiency in every department of human devel- 
opment depends on skill artificially worked up—worked up by 
routine, 

And all these brilliant inventions in the practical field and these 
brilliant discoveries in the field of science, those of them which are 
reached by sudden intuitive outsprings of the mind rather than by 
methodical processes of reasoning—and there be many such—are 
apt to be the work of well-routined minds; solidly methodized 
minds ; minds that have come to supreme facility by much precision 
and practice, so that, although seeming sudden, they are not mere 
guess-work and upstart movement but rather the blossoming of 
a plant which had in it the manifold potentialities of a blossom 
after all. 


YALE LECTURES. 371 


I say then, one of the uses of routine is facility. Work by 
method makes facile work at last, because we, in mind and body 
both, are capable of automatic action. 

And speaking still further on the idea that he who works by 
method and consents to routine, works easier and can do more 
work, I mention this. 

That routine gradually stamps out reluctance in us, so that we 
lie down under it as we do under any other inevitable and waste no 
time or friction in halting and rebelling. When the chaotic masses 
of the primal creation were first lumped into shapely globes and then 
set in the bondage of definite orbits and precise time-keeping, day 
and night forever, I can imagine that they did not enjoy it and 
would have sulked and possibly did sulk in the privacy of their own 
minds—but what was the use—the course of created things was 
established and started and there they were in the whirl of it. So 
sulking died out, just as a minister’s groanings over his first sermons 
died out, as the routine that he had chosen for life went on and as 
his groanings over his first pastor-work died out. Routine kills 
groanings and the good breath thus saved is turned into work. I 
have certain days in the week when I make parish calls, I will sup- 
pose ; a certain day or days when I attend to odds and ends ; cer- 
tain mornings when I write, certain hours when I receive the human 
family, certain hours when I pray, certain times when I fast, certain 
times when IJ take exercise, certain times when I cast overboard all 
work, empty myself of intentions and float round ina vacuum. I 
framed out my time in this manner years and years ago, I will still 
suppose, and now the question of times and seasons never comes up. 
Tt is fast-time say. Well, if I had not my routine established, I 
should beg off sometimes. There is nothing in fasting that is con- 
genial to the bodily appetites. What they like is eating. And 
where a person is born very fleshly they like eating first rate. So I 
incline to beg-off. And I not merely beg but I reason. An ingen- 
ious man can see a good many alluring arguments for not fasting. 
So I might spend a week debating the question, procrastinating, 
shivering on the brink, wondering whether I had better ever begin. 
So in the matter of calls, I had rather read my book. And in the 
matter of my prayer, my newspaper has just come in, or my sensi- 
bilities are dull, or I am somehow in a mysterious inertia. Now the 
non-routine man fritters away half his time, petting his own reluc- 
tancies, his indisposition to take up tasks and disagreeable duties ; 


372 YALE LECTURES. 


whereas, if his allotment of time from his God were clearly pro- 
grammed and foreordained, when this or that duty arrived he would 
move to it with something very like spontaneity. Take it as respects 
the choice of topics for sermons. Many ministers spend almost as 
much time hunting topics, or selecting topics from those which they 
have hunted down, as they do in unfolding the same ; and withal, 
this hunting business is much more vexatious and killing than un- 
folding is. Supposing now this topic-hunter had a prearranged 
general order of topics. Supposing he was a Christian-year man. 
Supposing he was a doctrinal preacher and worked up a course of 
doctrinal sermons once in so long. Supposing he even took for his 
rule the tossing up of a penny and letting heads or tails decide. 
Suppose almost anything in the direction of method and routine. 
Do you not see that that ends hunting, in the main? When a thing 
is nailed right on to a man by a prescribed order, he has nothing to 
do but take it and make the best of it and spend not a minute in 
further search, or in grumbling. You might imagine that a forced 
topic would breed grumbling, but it does not. Routine men find ~ 
that it does not. At Christmas, Epiphany, Good-Friday, Easter, 
Ascension and Whit Sunday—those Christian-tides, for example— 
you are looked to, I will suppose, for a particular sort of sermon 
every year so long as you live. But this, like any other circuit that 
any reasonable man or Christian body is likely to adopt, is full of the 
best kind of suggestiveness to the mind ; so that when any given date 
or period arrives, the mere coming of it with its cargo of meanings 
starts the man into fertility straightforth. Moreover it lies in the 
nature of the mind, that so soon as it plainly discerns the inevitable 
—especially if it is a genial inevitable—it acts like those spontane- 
ous atoms in the minister’s pile of sermon-material, when the minis- 
ter’s awful eye rested upon them. They started with alacrity and 
any mind in its predetermined and unescapable circuit of thought 
always developes alacrity so that, verily that is fulfilled which 
William Wordsworth said in his now famous address to Duty : 


Stern Lawgiver! Yet thou dost wear 
The Godhead’s most benignant grace; 
Nor know we anything so fair 
As is the smile upon thy face: 


Then Wordsworth takes wing in a flight like the following, still 
apostrophizing Duty :— 


YALE LECTURES. 373 


Flowers laugh before thee on their beds, 

And fragrance in thy footing treads; 

Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong; 

And the most ancient heavens, through Thee are fresh and strong. 


No doubt, each man of us ought to go to his duty in each case 
of duty by the pull in part at least of great motives consciously in 
him at the moment, and if we live long enough, and the grace of 
God to us-ward fails not, we shall eventually find ourselves in that - 
state ; a state so blessed that it is hard to wait for its coming ; but at 
present, as a matter of fact, we all have our lethargies, when the pull 
in us and on us of motives is feeble ; and in these low times, rather 
than that we totally come short and leave our duty undone, it is 
well if we are started forth by the simple nudge and joggle of 
routine ; fasting, for instance, because the time for fasting has come, 
calling on the parishioners because it is the day for it, praying be- 
cause it is the hour for prayer, and not because we so want to do. 
A debate might be raised on the exact moral worth of such perform- 
ances as those, either to the performer or to those performed upon, 
but all debate is cut short the moment it is mentioned that God 
himself has appointed days, dates, hours and numerous circularities 
of human action, knowing, all the while, that not one man in all 
generations forever would come up to those appointments, each 
and all, and every time, unlanguidly. He knew we could not do it. 
Nevertheless he made the appointments. Therefore his mind must 
be that we take these our necessary, occasional torpidities with us, 
and go in to the duties. And if that is his mind, then ye may 
reasonably look for a blessing, in such unaffirmative, matter-of- 
course routine fidelities. And I think it may be noticed, in human 
life, that the steadfast time-keepers, the men that never ask permis- 
sion of their moods to keep their engagements with God, and their 
engagements with men for God’s sake, are blessed. They make 
better characters than the disciples of do-as-you-feel. They are 
honester. They cannot be tampered with. Put them in an awful 
gap, turn away your head five minutes, and then look back ; they 
are there still. Turn your head, if you want to, six months. Still 
they are there. Cicero’s “abut, excessit, evastt, erupit,’ and the 
rest, does not apply to them. They have not erufit. They have 
not even adu¢. And they never will. What can you expect of a 
man that goes by his moods, never does any thing that he does not 
want to, or, at the best, procrastinates, hoping that sometime he will 


374 YALE LECTURES. 


want to. I say unto you, such an one has provided fundamentally 
for his own ruin, and for his own uselessness, considerably, among the 
children of men. The truth is, my Brother, by diligence you can 
kill your own moodiness and make yourself a steady-going-person. 
You can kill your moral moods, and you can kill your intellectual 
moods. I marvel when I notice how much more uniform the action 
of my own mind is than it once was. I can get something out of 
it any day. I do not say what, but something. Long ago, when I 
used to go to my study to think and write, I could not tell whether 
my mind would give down that day or not. NowI know. I know 
it will. So far as quantity of production is concerned, a stupid 
day is about as good as a bright one with me. And when a stupid 
writing-day happens along, I keep firmly to the routine of produc- 
tion and put up with some falling off in the quality, for fear that if 
I ease off on the routine, my once moody mind will fall from the 
grace of uniform productivity back into its original state of incon- 
stancy, costiveness and inability, and have whole days of no yield 
whatever. Keep your sap running, lest it forget how. 

As I come now to the close of this lecture, I begin to think of 
my own reputation for consistency, for did I not name it as one of 
the evils of automatism on its religious side, that it tends towards, 
even if it does not involve an inattentive, mechanical and therefore 
formalistic style of observance and duty-doing ; nevertheless, have I 
not gone boldly forward to magnify routine fidelities? I have not 
the least doubt that I could worm my way out of that incongruity if, 
after having spoken to you so long, I might take time to do the nec- 
essary amount of squirming. I can recollect the time when if I 
seemed to contradict myself, I was frightened ; but I have got over 
that. Now I go straight on and say what seems to be true as 
regards my subject, and take it for granted that all those sayings 
will fight it out among themselves and get a real concord and 
peace. 

The problem to-day is to accept routine and even automatisms 
with their unquestionable advantages, and yet not take on any of 
their disadvantages. A very critical piece of navigation. But, 
Beloved, that is about where we mortals are in most things. It is 
like paddling a birch canoe. You must sit in the middle, sit per- 
pendicular, not turn your head much either way, and part your hair 
in the middle (as some one has said), else you upset. Well, there 
is where we get discipline. In this life of ours, with its many forms 


YALE LECTURES. 375 


and instances of difficult navigation, we are to consider, to balance 
things, to watch ourselves, to secure preponderations often by the 
weight of a single hair, to run the gauntlet of many dangers and 
not be caught by any of them. ‘That is what we are in the world 
for and out of it comes character. 

A large amount of our activity, and a considerable part of our 
responsible action needs to be relegated to our automatic powers. 
After that is done there is no danger that there will not be hundreds 
of things left to be attended to volitionally and in full consciousness 
of what we are about. Take our constant walking as an illustration. 
We simply cannot give to it our voluntary attention. There is too 
much else to busy ourselves about. It must go on mechanically. 
Take the operations of an accountant. He adds up his long 
columns of figures and runs through his long processes with spon- 
taneous inattention ; and his business would kill him if it was not so. 
Take these mechanics who stand at a bench and do some one 
small thing over and over forever. We call them “skilled work- 
men,” and pay them high wages, but this skill of theirs that we are 
willing to pay so much for, is simply the more or less automatic 
facility into which they have perseveringly routined themselves. 
But their craft still requires from them a great deal of determined 
conscious attention, and by as much as their faculties operate auto- 
matically, by so much are their minds released and at liberty to give 
themselves to this conscious and considerate attention, and thus 
reach on towards perfection in their craft. 

So’ in the domain of morals and religion. In so far as our 
numerous fidelities to man and God have come one after the other 
by long practice to be what you may call automatised, we are set 
free for the labors of intentional and effort-full action. By the grace 
of God our expectation is that some day our total action will be to 
a good degree automatised. At all events it will be spontaneous. 
It will come from us with ease and satisfaction. We believe this, 
because it has been promised. We believe it too because already, 
at particular times, under special inspirations of the Holy Ghost, the 
whole team of our lumbering and reluctant powers and energies 
have swung into a blithesome flight, a beautiful fury, a complete 
liberation, a something unvolitional and lyrical to the last degree. 
That is the ideal condition of man; and this automatism that I 
have said so much about, with its perils and its many values, is the 
- foreshadow and similitude of that. And it is a precious thing that 


376 YALE LECTURES. 


even in the natural action of our natural powers, and so low down 
as these half-wrecked, corruptible bodies of ours, this automatic 
similitude and prophecy doth develop itself in never-so-many forms. 


ihe 
mi 


Kae ; 
se 
De Dy 


"iP Shih 
apy ete 
ana 


ie 
* Nw 


Ais 





Date Due © 





1D Gea eens 


>. an 








